So many people are making roses. We arrive each day at 3pm for our four hour stint to find someone happily sitting at our table making roses in their own way. We have found we don't necessarily need to demonstrate how to make the roses, although some folk want help.
It was much quiter today. One of the attendants had the time to make a rose and a drawing. Susan had time to visit one of the attendants upstairs who has taken great delight in the project. She gave each of these ladies one of the cyclone pegs she brought from Shetland.
Nina wanted to make a very particular kind of rose and was not satisfied with her first one. Roxane cut a big, wide piece of felt for her so she could make a big rose. After she'd made it she wanted to take it home and immediately put it in her handbag. We're finding this is not unusual and have spotted a number of roses floating around the gallery on lapels and complementing hairstyles. Roxane figured out another way to arrange a swap with Nina so that she could keep her rose and we have one to bring back to Shetland.
The tag in the middle was written by a woman whose response to our work was incredibly touching. We've decided to display the Shetland roses until the last three days so that more visitors can read their messages. Therefore we are asking everyone to return to collect their gift. When Roxane asked her if she could come back because we wanted to give her the gift, she said, "No, I don't need to come back, you've already given me a gift. Thank you so much."
Some of our visitors are tourists themselves in St Petesburg. One couple who are university lecturers in the Ural Mountains spent nearly an hour with us. They spent one and a half days non-stop driving to St Petesburg. We showed them the map of Shetland and they asked how many days it took to drive from the top to bottom. You can imagine their surprise when we told them just a few hours! They asked us what we do in our spare time as they are musicians. They downloaded some of their folk songs onto Roxane's laptop.
Anya, Masha and Olya, a physicist, a journalist and a sociologist, approached us shyly but were soon very animated. We bumped into them later in the evening on Nevsky Prospekt while we were trying to find more floral tape - but that's another story!
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