Yes I know, very very late coming, but nevertheless, here it is, the short but sweet, sum up of our cruise.
The instructors, Dorothy Clee and Amanda Daly, did a wonderful job. Dorothy, as usual, had everything organized before hand and new the system for setting up the sewing machines and all the cords and power outlets, not an easy thing to do on a ship I must say. With her incredible side man (lady), Larraine, they had the room all set up and ready to go the night we left port.
Quilting Cruises can be a bit of a challenge with all the set up and things we need to arrange ahead of time, but all went well and the ladies had a great time.
A 14 day cruise to New Zealand with 8 sea days, so plenty of time to have classes and free time to work on their projects as we had the room the entire time throughout the cruise. It was a great cruise, although as I had 2 groups, there was a lot of behind the scenes stuff to do.
Dorothy has some great pics on her blog of the quilts and some of the ladies in the group (she also has taken the time to write a great review of the cruise, well worth a read) Dorothy's blog
We are planning another quilt cruise on the Voyager of the Seas again. This is going to be a 10 night South Pacific and Fiji cruise on 27th February, 2014. You can find out about it here Crafting Cruises
The other cruise was our 4th Scrapbook Cruise with Melissa Kennedy. We had 2 conference rooms for each group. They were great size rooms, with plenty of space to spread out. The scrapbook group this time were very spoiled, they had a table to themselves. So each lady got to really spread out. I don't think we can manage that again, so they were lucky.
We did have a few problems with the scrapbook room though, but it was sorted out eventually. The air conditioning had some repairs done to it, unfortunately, the maintenance guy was not really very good at his repairs and over night we had a leak. The sad part was, 4 ladies had water all over their tables and all the work they had out on the tables, were soaking wet. Paper, wet, a disaster!
The other problem was that in New Zealand, the tides are low (or something like that), so they had to have the gangway on deck 2, where the conference rooms are. We had a choice of rooms and as the quilters had sewing machines and extension cords everywhere, they decided to move the scrapbook room. What that meant was, on each of the NZ ports, 3 in total, the ladies had to pack up and the tables were all moved. The crew would set the tables up again at the end of the port day, but still, a lot of moving around for them. The ladies were great about it though, which was a relief for me I can tell you!
We are still working on a cruise date for Melissa, not as many options for next year and groups are buying up fast which means no group space for us. Hopefully we'll have something arranged in the next couple of weeks. Keep checking back on our website Crafting Cruises
