Never again!

“Never again!”

Written on: 17/06/2012 by dtkmb

I would not recommend Sew Many Places for a tour. The tour was very disorganized and the arrangements kept changing. It was hard to get responses to emails about changes and billing. Considering that the tour groups were filled with quilters, there were no stops on the tour at local quilt shops in Ireland. There are quilt shops in Ireland - why not support their local quilt shops. We would have loved to see quilt shops, yarn and woolen mills - there are lots of sheep in Ireland. The hotels were nice but were outside the cities so you could not walk into town/ cities - had to take a taxi to get in. Jim West organized the tours plus the quilt festival in Ireland. From the lack of organization at the festival, it looked like Jim had never been in a quilt show in the US. The buildings for the show and classes were not labeled to match the maps distributed of the campus. There were missing labels for the quilts for the first 2 days. The ribbons for the winners were posted on the third day and we couldn't tell what the category was for the ribbons - ex. hand quilting, machine quilting, etc. It was hard to find the classes and locations were changed without information. Supply lists were not available for many classes so you could not be prepared for the class. On the third day we found out that there were free lectures but no way to find out about them. It would have been easy to put up a white board in the registration building with info about class openings and free lectures. Looked like Jim didn't contact the Irish quilt guilds in Ireland to participate and help with the festival like guilds in US do.