Sunday, after the last class, we headed back over to the Expo to collect our beadwork from the exhibit. When I turned to enter the Perlen Akademie space in hall 5 I saw this gorgeous dress that Amy would just love! It had concentric circles and stripes and all in great colors. Inside the dress is Petra, owner of Das PerLament, a bead store in Bonn. AND, with her is my FaceBook friend, Sabine Lippert. We enjoyed a fabulous visit over coffee at my hotel, before they headed back for Bonn. Sabine, a certain kindred spirit, also calls her beadwork patterns "recipes" and she talked about European FB friends that she actually knows, and I'd thought I'd meet while at Creativa. Laura Andrews is teaching at Petra's store for a couple days before heading back home. Petra said she will collect me when I finish teaching in Belgium and then I'll teach at Das PerLament. Now I'll have to get this on the calendar and stop just thinking about it.

Five beaders in my classes are bead store owners. Laurie Glynn (right) owns a store in Switzerland. After we met in class Wednesday, I saw her among the 80,000 people at the Creativa Expo and was excited to see someone I know! She said she'd booked a Hawaiian massage called Lomilomi. I'd never heard of this before and was fascinated. To her left is Anita, who teaches beadwork.

Nele owns Ne-co bead store in Belgium. She was in a couple of my classes and we had greater opportunity to visit at breakfast. It was interesting to hear about mangosteen juice and its health benefits to her.

From our email correspondences, I expected that I might see Kang at Creativa. It was perfectly lucky that she came on Saturday while I was demonstrating in the Bead Expo area of Hall 5. She had only the one day since she is on her way to Paris and then, was it Italy? You may recall her from June's entries. It was when Tulip Co had their first exhibition in the U.S. They invited me to join them at TNNA in Columbus OH. This is where I met Pearl from Knitty City (the first retailer to carry Tulip's crochet hooks!), enjoyed quick visits with the "crafty retailer" Pat Reisenburger (wholesaler of extraordinarily beautiful merino wool and Swarovski elements), filmed another feltmaking demonstration for Knitting Daily on public television and taught the Tulip staff to bead!