(Out) Classed?

On Saturday, after an enforced abstinence, and a long wait of several months, I taught a scrapbooking class. This was for a local craft shop hoping to encourage some women into this addictive and expensive (ie valuable for said craft shop) hobby. The class was for two layouts, designed from shop goods; and for three hours.

I had had some difficulty designing the layouts in the first place, as there was really no specific reasoning behind the "Scrapbooking Workshop" other than the shopowner, Jenny, had been requested previously by Mrs Anonomous for one "on scrapbooking". She was oblivious to who might want to attend the workshop, or whether they were newbies or seasoned (ie old and salty) professionals. So, I had absolutely nothing to go on, and designed my layouts to fit some Mrs Average middle-ground instead.

As it was, when arriving at the shop with my box of goodies, and a big heavy album, at 12:30pm, half an hour before the class was to commence, I was escorted up some old wobbly stairs to a reasonably large workshop area. The shop that I thought I knew as a cramped little craft store, appeared to have hidden rabbit warrens of office space in the back of it. Our work tables were old desks and wonky old office chairs, but perhaps better than a crop held at a local scouting den. We were surrounded by shelf after shelf of 3 ring binders with invoices for purchases from the Year 1960-something.

The women started arriving on time (a plus) and of an age and hairstyle which made me aware that I would appear the youngest by far in the room (an awful negative). It's never good if the supposed teacher and expert appears younger than the participants - people judge your expertise somehow, by age, and forget to listen to your credentials. Of course, I have white-lied a bit here, to emphasise a point. There was a mother and daughter team there, and the daughter was younger - I know, because she slipped off her overcoat to reveal a plunging backline showing off a rather grand black tattoo of half of some kind of a bird. Although I have tattoos also - to prove my youth and vitality- they are not of the public display nature that even younger women can get away with.

I had a class of 7 women - mother and daughter, there to learn how to create a card for their wedding invites; three older women (with perms) who frequent card making workshops as a hobby to get themselves out of the house and knew each other but not enough to remember each other's names (!); another woman who had just arrived in the area locally, looked a lot older than she probably was, and looked even lonelier than I probably did, but who might actually be a convert to the hobby in the future; and then there was the Scotswoman card teacher.

Jenny had spoken to me earlier, before Mrs Scotts made an appearance, with glowing attributes towards her, and a story of how Mrs Scotts might possibly tell me how she used card making as a form of stress relief towards fighting breast cancer. All I could remember was that Mrs Scotts taught the card making workshops and was the loveliest person there could be.

She turned out to be not quite that lovely. In fact she was solely and incredibly disruptive towards the class, and spent the majority of it trying to appear an expert of techniques, and selling her card making classes to the other participants there. This, despite the fact that she's blatantly never encountered any of the techniques I taught, didn't know what a hermafix dry-dots adhesive roller was, didn't know what a paper trimmer was, and seemed to only prefer her own two techniques - tea bag folding and the brand new whiz bang iris folding. When I also started selling some of the stock downstairs in the shop, she let out the fact that she had no idea what stock and bits and pieces there was down there. What were fibres, she enquired. (!)

For a supposed professional, she also appeared to have to borrow all my own personal tools including the whiz-bang hermafix, a pencil and accidentally lose the little mini envelope and tag templates I had brought (until I kindly located them for her to move onto other waiting classmates).

Mrs Scotts managed to bulls-up her scrapbook layout twice also, unable or unwilling to follow instructions (or perhaps she can't read). To be fair, a couple of others messed up their own projects - one lady seemed reasonably proud of the fact that she was the slow one in class (as we know, there is always "one in every class", and she had obviously pinpointed this spot for herself many years previously as the role she was most successful as) and the other lady just had no mathematical sense about her. However, Mrs Scotts just had an attitude problem.

When they all left, having mostly accomplished a lovely new page, the desks were cleaned off from coffee cups and scraps of paper. All, apart from the space left by Mrs Scotts, who deemed it her undeniable right to have her space tidied up by who? - presumably the shop staff? She made to leave, after announcing "she had enjoyed the class", as she had gone into it with an "open mind". Ironically, Jenny the shopowner arrived immediately after this announcement, to see everyone's creations and had started the next conversation along the lines of, "Mrs Scotts - how did you find it, because I know that you weren't looking forward to the class?"Open mind, or opinionated mind, you tell me?

Was I outclassed by a cardmaker and teacher trying to gain participants to her own classes - I don't think so. But you tell me?

I left the shop myself a bit later - and left every single person in that class wondering around the shop, and buying shop stuff. I know I must have made one big impression at least (which is a good statistic out of 7 women card-makers) - the next day I was in the local leisure and garden centre, moseying around their own crafts' department and found one class participant enquiring into scrapbooking supplies there too. When she saw me, she did a quick vanishing-act around a stand, as though scrapbooking was something to be discrete about - she'll get over it!