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We still met every now and again, Ruth telling me about her job as a technician in the science department of Inverness High School. She also took up spinning (wool) which I had been doing for years. Always keen to expand her crafting skills I think that Ruth saw it as a means to end for embellishing her dressmaking projects rather than an opening for extending to homespun jumpers! Although we did go together to a demonstration of a knitting loom enabling quick knitting of thicker wool and both bought one. Ruth was running up things in no time while I never got to grips with mine.
After conducting several, mostly felting, workshops for them Ruth joined the Highland Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers. I was already a member so then we met up again much more regularly and, when we both became members of the committee, and meetings were hosted by Ruth in her workshop at Inchmore, I saw even more of her.
And now? Hard to believe she is no longer around. My strongest memory is of her generosity both of material things (she gave me many of her outgrown baby and toddler clothes) and more particularly of her time. She always had time to talk and never made you feel you were holding her back. One specific memory for me was turning up at her house one Christmas Eve (I think with a Christmas card) to find Ruth sitting amidst boxes of decorations and many goose eggs which she had painted and varnished. She was busy decorating the house - which she loved to do - but it all had to be done by midnight, a seemingly impossible timescale given the size of the house and the number of decorations she had in the boxes around her, even not including food preparation for the next day. But she was totally unphased and didn't make me feel I was holding her back. She always had time for everyone.
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