Silk Study Tour to Japan

I know I said I wouldn’t begin posting here until Saturday and that’s still the official beginning but I thought a line or two might serve to whet your appetite for what comes next….

May 18

We had a lovely breakfast at the Crowne Plaza hotel with Jacky, Ann, Doug,Brenda, and Ayumi.
Our travel agent Ayumi, was able to get permission from her boss to meet us for breakfast and after all the hard work via telephone and email it was nice for the group to meet her in person.
A quick shuttle ride took us to LAX where we met up with Brecia, JB, Elizabeth, Elisabeth, Janet, and Melinda. We all enjoyed getting to know one another a bit as we waited in line to get our boarding passes as most of the travelers did not know one another. We were an interesting group at gate 123- knitting, stitching, and working on iPads as we waited the two hours before boarding. Brenda showed her beadwork around as well as stitched on her lovely fisherman style sashiko jacket, Brecia knitted on a free lace piece, Ann worked on a fair isle sweater, Elisabeth knitted on something lovely across the way. JB worked on a sashiko piece in white thread on blue while I stitched on a soon to be shibori on silk. Doug worked on the iPad and we all got to know each other a little bit more. We discussed some of the books that were on the reading list- I think Melinda really took that list to heart and had read most of them it seemed. We are fortunate to have Jacqueline Fields with us who wrote the book “American Silk” which is a wonderful historical study of the silk industry in America from 1850-1930. This was also on the reading list to prepare us for the journey into our study of silk.

It’s a great group, full of enthusiasm, talent and with an incredible wealth and variety of knowledge. We are going to see, meet and study some fantastic things together on this trip but I can see already that if we were to simply sequester this group in a room together for any duration of time we would not run out of things to learn from each other.
We will have some time on our bus to do just that. Ten days is not going to be enough time but I trust that we will create lasting friendships and working relationships from our experience here together.

The bulk of the group is sitting in the back of the plane together and JB and I are across the aisle in the next section. The flight is great so far- Singapore Airlines has kept us quite comfortable and we have only a couple of short hours left before we arrive in Narita where we will be met by Hirata san and the rest of the group-Maggie, Victoria, Loralu, Kathy, and Nat.

We will tuck into the very comfortable Narita Hilton for the night and dream of silkworms munching their way through fields of mulberry…
O yasuminasai-
Mata ne!