Tag: conference

Posted on

Memories of the 2012 CGOA Conference in Manchester, NH

I returned home last Monday, July 2nd, from the CGOA Chain Link Conference in Manchester, NH. It was a blast!!! I taught 6 classes and met a lot of really nice crocheters, knitters and tatters there. If you have the chance to attend the conference, I recommend that you go. You won’t be disappointed!

My plane took off from Phoenix Sky Harbor Int’l Airport, heading to Manchester on Tuesday, June 26, 2012. The flight made a scheduled stop in Denver, then continued on straight to Manchester from Denver. That morning, I remembered that a designer friend of mine, Andee Graves, lives in Colorado. I was wondering what flight Andee might be taking, so I watched for her when the new passengers came onto the plane in Denver. To my surprise and delight, Andee got on the plane!!! After I got her attention, we sat next to each other and talked the whole way to Manchester, which made the time pass a lot faster!

The first day of the conference was Wednesday, when I attended Professional Development Day (PDD for short). It was a day packed with information for crochet professionals or aspiring crochet professionals. At PDD, I learned more about designing, tech editing, self-publishing, using social media, teaching and producing crochet videos. These and many more topics were presented by other crochet professionals there. KJ Hay’s presentation about tech editing was hilarious and very creative! Instead of reading the information she wanted to present, she made a little “skit” out of it, complete with her bunny slippers! It was a riot! I’ll be presenting the topic of “Contract Crocheting” at PDD in Reno in September. It should be a lot of fun.

Kathryn White at PDD
Terry Kehrer at PDD

At PDD, I sat at a table with Kathryn White, Michele Maks, Theresa Kehrer, Joyce Bragg and Karen Ballard. Here are photos of 3 of them:

Michele Maks at PDD

Then on Wednesday night, I taught my first class at the conference: Symbol Crochet. All the students were eager to learn and did very well in class. It was a little difficult to teach a class after a full day of PDD because I’m a morning person, not a night person! But I persevered and was able to think straight, must to my surprise and delight! I must have been running on adrenaline!

On Thursday morning, I taught my Faux Tatted Necklace class from my pattern with the same name. Here’s a photo of the necklace:

Faux Tatted Necklace

 

Carlotta and her necklace
Kim and her bracelet

And here are some of the happy students with their necklaces (or bracelets) in progress:

 

 

 

Victoria and me

There was also a mother and daughter in that class. This is the daughter and me:

 

I was amazed and extremely surprised that one of the students in that class had taught herself to crochet the night before! She was still learning how to hold the hook and thread, but she was patient and persistent and she did great!!!

I had Thursday afternoon off from teaching, so I spent it with one of my mentees, Theresa Kehrer. On Thursday night, they held the Design Contest Awards. Here’s a photo of the center of the display with all the entries, located on the show floor (Note: Not all the entries are shown in this photo, just the ones in the center of the display):

Design Competition Display

I entered my new shawl pattern that I made in the continuous crochet motifs method (I blogged about it on May 19), but I didn’t get a prize for it.  Here is a photo of that shawl:

Byzantine Shawl in Design Contest

All of the black around the large red and orange motifs is done with one strand (actually 2 strands because I needed to use 2 balls of black yarn) so there are only 4 ends of black yarn to weave in when you’re done crocheting the shawl instead of 128! I’m thinking about designing an edging for this shawl before I publish the pattern. I think it needs a little something extra. It’s too bad I didn’t add an edging before entering it in the contest. Oh well! Better luck next year!

Kathryn White, who is a good friend of mine, won 4 prizes in the contest! She took first and third places in the Accessories category, third place in the Thread category and first place in the Artistic Expression category! Her designs (and all the winners’ designs) are amazing! You can view the winners here on Doris Chan’s blog: http://dorischancrochet.com/2012/06/28/cgoa-2012-crochet-design-competition-results/. You can see all the entries in the Design Contest here: http://www.flickr.com//photos/14498426@N03/sets/72157630091305846/show/. Enjoy the eye candy!!!

After the Design Contest Awards came the shopping floor preview, which is always a lot of fun! Who doesn’t love looking at and touching beautiful yarns?

I went to the Dance Party for a little while after that, but left in plenty of time to get a good night’s sleep so I could think straight the next morning to teach classes again! It’s important to me to be my best and think as clearly as I can when I’m teaching. I owe that to my students. And that doesn’t include staying up until the wee hours of the morning!!!

Whenever I have to travel to the East Coast for the CGOA Conference, I start adjusting my internal clock 2 weeks before the conference so I don’t have to try to adjust to the 3 hour time difference in one night! It works great! Over the course of the 2 weeks, I was able to eventually go to bed and get up in the morning 2-3 hours early before I left for the conference, so I was already used to East Coast time when I got there!

On Friday, I taught my Beginning and Intermediate Bruges Lace classes. Both of these classes went well and the students enjoyed learning how to form several styles of Bruges Lace tapes, how to curve them, join them to each other (and to motifs) and loop the tapes over themselves. It was a great day!

That night, the CGOA Annual Member Meeting took place. Normally, I sit with the other members in the audience, but this time I sat at the head table with the CGOA Board members. I had to keep the secret for weeks of me filling a vacancy on the Board: Karen Whooley is leaving the Board due to family matters. This is the first time I’ve been on the CGOA Board in the 10 years that I’ve been a CGOA member. I’m looking forward to giving back to CGOA and helping to improve the CGOA Masters Program (I’m the new liaison to the new Masters Committee: Jane Rimmer and Carol Moore are taking the places of Karen Whooley and Kathleen Sams as co-chairs of the Masters Committee).

On Saturday, I attended my first CGOA Board meeting bright and early at 7AM with the other Board members (I’m glad that I’m a morning person!). However, I had to leave the Board meeting early in order to teach my Shuttle Tatting class all day! Every one of the 11 students in the class learned to shuttle tat at various skill levels. It’s not exactly an easy thing to learn, but they were all patient and persistent students! I’m very proud of every one of them! I can’t wait to see what they create in shuttle tatting!

The Fashion Show and Dinner was held on Saturday night. I modeled in the Fashion Show and pinned a Masters Pin on one of my mentees, Carlotta Craig. Here we are in the pinning ceremony:

Pinning Carlotta!

It was a wonderful night and it was hard to say goodbye to many friends at the conference, as many people leave that night or the following morning. I saw Karen Manthey, Bobbie Matela, Carol Alexander, Kathleen Sams and many, many more friends and colleagues at the dinner and conference. Here is a photo of me at the Fashion Show (in the center) with 2 of my mentees: Theresa Kehrer (on the left) and Shari White (on the right):

 

 

Terry, Shari and Me

 

 

I taught my last class, Writing Crochet Patterns, on Sunday morning. The students in this class were all very eager to learn more about writing crochet patterns and improving their pattern writing skills! Many of them were newer or beginning designers. I look forward to seeing their design careers grow!

 

After having lunch with Jane Rimmer and Carol Moore on Sunday afternoon, I walked into the show floor and found myself volunteering to help take down the Red Heart/Crochetville booth. It was a lot of fun! I received many skeins of free yarn and crochet thread for my efforts!!! Normally I wouldn’t accept so much yarn at a conference because I’d have to find a way to get it home! But I knew I had extra space in my second suitcase because I gave out so many handouts in my classes and that space was now vacant to fill with yarn on the way home!!! Thank you very much, Kathleen! I will use the yarn for some crochet designs as soon as I find some extra time to make them! Here’s a photo of Andee Graves wrapping up the boxes on the pallets with plastic/shrink wrap before the driver took them away:

Andee wrapping boxes

All in all, I had a wonderful time at the conference and I’m looking forward to teaching 6 more classes at the CGOA Chain Link Conference in Reno in September! I’d better get to work and prepare those classes before time slips away! It’ll be here before I know it!!!

 

Posted on

Jean Leinhauser: A Crochet Legend Remembered

If you are a crochet enthusiast like me, and especially if you’ve been crocheting for as long as I have, then you have certainly run across the name of Jean Leinhauser. Jean was one of the pioneers and legends in the crochet industry. If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to tell you a little about Jean.

Jean was born in August, 1933 and passed away one year ago, on June 12, 2011. She worked in the needlework field for 4-5 decades! Back in 1964, she was working as Design Director for the Boye Needle Company in Chicago. She had put together a knitting program that could be used in inner city high schools and was asked to do a crochet program, too. But Jean didn’t know how to crochet! So she spent 4 days at home teaching herself to crochet and came up with the crochet program for Boye. She also wrote the information for their packaged crochet products and started doing leaflets with crochet patterns for them, as well. At that time, the only crochet patterns that were published were by yarn companies.

In 1971, Jean realized how much money Boye was making on the leaflets she was doing, so she decided to start her own company! That was the beginning of Leisure Arts, the first needlework pattern publisher that was not associated with a yarn company. Six years later, Jean sold Leisure Arts and started American School of Needlework (ASN), where she also published needlework leaflets. Sometime in 2002, Jean sold ASN to Dynamic Resource Group (DRG), the owners of Annie’s Attic, the Needlecraft Shop and House of White Birches. Jean stayed with DRG for 2 years as editor of Crochet! magazine. Then in 2004, she left DRG and started producing crochet books with her good friend, Rita Weiss, who worked with her for many years at ASN. Over the past 5 decades,Jean Leinhauser published hundreds, if not thousands, of crochet books and leaflets. I have dozens of Jean’s books in my crochet library to this day. Here is a photo of Rita and Jean at a Crochet Guild of America (CGOA) Conference (Jean is on the left and Rita is on the right):

Jean and Rita

I first met Jean in January, 2002, at a craft trade show (HIA) in Anaheim, CA when Jean still owned ASN. Jean was sitting at a table with Rita Weiss and Bobbie Matela. I was in awe of meeting this crochet legend and a little scared, too! I was a new designer and didn’t have many designs published at the time. Jean looked at photos of some designs I had made and to my surprise, she bought a couple of them!

Fast forward 2 1/2 years to the summer of 2004. I was working on a paper quilling book that God had dumped in my lap (without me even having to submit a proposal for the book). Jean and Rita had just started their new book producing company called Creative Partners and were looking for someone to hire as a technical editor for the crochet patterns in their books. I had never done this type of work before and said I had an interest in being a tech editor. To my total shock, Jean remembered meeting me at the trade show over 2 years before! She gave me their tech editing test and I passed the test, to the surprise of all 3 of us!

Jean was always encouraging, kind, loving, understanding and more. She always encouraged new designers. She loved people and took a genuine interest in everyone she met. She was my biggest and best mentor, teaching me the ropes of tech editing and starting my tech editing career. I will always be indebted to her. We had great fun e-mailing each other for quite a few years about editing and the challenges it poses. Whenever I felt like pulling my hair out, Jean would say something in an e-mail that made me laugh, which eased my frustration. She had a funny sense of humor, or as Marcy Smith, the editor of Interweave Crochet magazine called it, “a wicked sense of humor”. She was always interested in what was going on in my life and always had love and encouragement to share with anyone in need. Jean attended all of the CGOA Conferences, along with Rita Weiss. She was my “class angel” at the 2009 conference where I taught 4 classes with only one hand because I had broken my wrist 2 1/2 weeks before! Here is a photo of Jean and me at that conference:

Jean and me

Jean and Rita were 2 of the 3 members of the “Old Broads” club. The other member of the club was Margaret Hubert. All 3 of them wore sparkly rhinestone pins that said “Old Broads Rule” at the CGOA Conferences. It is a little uncertain to the rules of club membership. Some say members in this exclusive club had to be over a certain age or had to be in the publishing business for as long as Rita and Jean. Others say you had to be a knit/crochet designer still working in the industry and you had to have your first book published before 1968! In any case, the 3 of them wore their pins with pride and we all laughed at this exclusive club!

In July of 2011, at the CGOA Conference in Minneapolis, MN, Jean Leinhauser was the first inductee (posthumously) into the new CGOA Hall of Fame. The CGOA Board of Directors voted to rename the Hall of Fame in Jean’s honor. It is now called the Jean Leinhauser CGOA Hall of Fame. This year, Margaret Hubert will be the second inductee into the Hall of Fame. To read about the Hall of Fame, visit the CGOA website here.

Several years ago, Jean and Rita decided to get “glamour” shots for including in some new books by Leisure Arts. Here is Jean’s glamour shot:

Jean’s glamour shot

She was beautiful to me, with or without makeup!

I will never forget Jean. She impacted so many lives and is deeply missed by many people. She was an inspiration to all designers, many of whom were extremely afraid to meet her (according to the stories I’ve read)! But Jean was humble and approachable, even though she was a “legend” in the needlework industry.

She was a huge blessing to me. I thank God for bringing her into my life and for allowing me to be her friend, as she was mine.

Rest in Peace, Jean, knowing that you are loved and missed by thousands of people worldwide.

Posted on

The CGOA Chain Link Conference

Do you love to take crochet classes and learn new crochet techniques? Do you enjoy meeting people who have the same love of crochet as you? Do you live close to Manchester, NH (or Reno, NV) or have the means and ability to travel to one of these cities? Then the CGOA Conference is for you!!! You’ll meet many designers, yarn manufacturer representatives, publishers and crochet enthusiasts at the conference. You will be able to take crochet (and knitting) classes that will push your crochet knowledge and skills to the next level! It’s a little slice of “crochet heaven” here on earth!!!

In addition to the crochet and knitting classes at the conference, there is a CGOA dinner & fashion show, shopping floor (with yarn, patterns, tools etc), design contest, dance party, designer meet & greet (with the editors in attendance), Professional Development Day, CGOA Masters Program, book signings and more!

There will be 2 CGOA Conferences this year: one in Manchester, NH at the end of June and another in Reno, NV in the middle of September.

I will be teaching 6 classes at each of the conferences this year.

These are the classes I’ll be teaching in Manchester:

Simplifying Symbol Crochet, “Faux” Tatting Crochet Necklace, Beginning Bruges Lace, Intermediate Bruges Lace, Tatting the Old-Fashioned Way (sold out!) and Crochet Pattern Writing 101.

These are the classes I’ll be teaching in Reno:

Beginning Filet Crochet, Intermediate Filet Crochet, Playful Polish Star, Simplifying Symbol Crochet, Intermeshing 101 and Reading & Understanding Crochet Patterns.

The other crochet teachers at the NH conference are Vashti Braha, Lily Chin, Joan Davis, Darla Fanton, Margaret Hubert, Karen Klemp, Marty Miller, Carol Ventura and Karen Whooley. They will be teaching some fantastic crochet classes, too! Congratulations to Vashti Braha, whose 4 classes are sold out already!!!!! You must be doing something right, Vashti! That makes me want to take one of your classes soon (when I’m not teaching classes, too).

For more information about both of the CGOA Chain Link Conferences and all the classes being taught by various teachers, click here: http://www.knitandcrochetshow.com/.

The conference is really a blast! If you decide to attend, you won’t regret it! And please introduce yourself to me at the conference. I’d love to meet you in one of my classes or at the conference in general!!!

Happy crocheting,

Susan

Back to top