North Island Sewing Meet 2015 in pictures…mostly

Last weekend was the first ever North Island Sewing Meet (that I know of anyway 😉 ) so I cruised up SH1 to Rotorua with a few of the Wellington Sewing Bloggers to make some new friends and sew up a storm.

In short, it was AWESOME!

We got home on Sunday night absolutely shattered…I took way too many projects but that turned out to be a great plan. I hopped between about 4 of them while chatting, helping, visiting Spotlight and eating…I’ll post those items in full as I finish each of them.

The best way to sum up the weekend is in pictures with only a few words so here are some from me and quite a few I stole from the #NISM tag on Instagram (click on each image to see the original).

My 82 litre container full of two sewing machines and an excessively optimistic amount of sewing projects. With 4 ladies and 7 sewing machines it was a very full Outback boot…and a slightly slower trip up than anticipated 😉

The Desert Road with Mount Ngauruhoe peeking through the clouds.

Our venue was the The Arts Village – the home of an amazing community arts organisation run by volunteers with several rooms and large bright studios for short-term hire. I completely forgot to get an overall shot of the building but you know you’ve hired the right place for a creative sewing weekend away when they have a huge yarn bombed tree out front, right?

Setting up in Studio One

We organised surprise goodie bags for everyone. Spotlight Rotorua hooked us up with the bag bags and threw in some sewing machine needles, a fat flat, some ribbon and a lint roller. We also added in discount vouchers from The Fabric Store, Muse Patterns, Cottage Flair, Polynesia Spa and an assortment of cute little pin cushions that Sandra made.

We had a big group dinner on Saturday night…drinks and dessert of course.

 

On Sunday Toni finished her altered muslin and bravely cut into her shot silk.

Then Nikki treated us to a dance in her newly finished skirt – plenty of time for photos before home time.

We actually did a lot of sewing!

Oh and there was of food, including cake 😉

Huge thanks to Penny, Carolyne, Sandra, Sara, Trish, Toni, Jacqui, Juliet, Robyn, Helen, Kate, Kate, Kirsty and Nikki for joining myself and Sandra for an amazing weekend.

See you girls next time!

The North Island Sewing Meet…is on!

Thank you to everyone who showed interest in the North Island Sewing Meet – we’re excited to say that we had enough responses to make it an official event! Yay!

All the details are on the Eventbrite page waiting for you to sign up 🙂

If you indicated yes on the Google form then you should already have received an invite.

Please sign up as soon as possible, the sooner we can confirm numbers the better the meet will be.

It’s not too late to join us, just jump on over and register!

Don’t forget to help us spread the word by blog, instagram and twitter – see you soon 🙂

Let’s all meet up in Rotorua and sew!

I have been busy scheming with fellow Wellington Sewing Blogger Sandra, planning big things…like a mega sewing meet in the central North Island!

Are you a sewist in NZ and wanna come hang out with us for a weekend?

Great, let’s do it!

There are still some details to iron out (hehe, iron, see what I did there?) but the general idea is that we’ll hire a suitable venue in Rotorua to meet up on the first weekend in August 2015 – that’s Saturday the 1st and Sunday the 2nd.

We’ll sew, gossip, swap fabric/patterns/knowledge, go fabric shopping, eat food and have a fun weekend making lots of new sewing friends…and hopefully some clothes too 😉

We’ve created a form to aid us in our planning, please follow this link for more details and to register your interest.

The WSBN are very keen and already planning mini buses full of sewing machines cruising up SH1.

Hopefully you are as excited as us and maybe we could even make this an annual event.