I can relate to your experience. The same thing happened to my friend and I. We went to a shop that took us over an hour to drive to, the owner of the shop gave us no instructions just had us pick out something we wanted to do from her projects she had in the store. We both chose a simple table runner because we were fairly new to quilting. We bought the material (quit pricey) from her. We took our own machines and our own accessories to use. Between her waiting on customers, answering the phone and babysitting for her neighbor's baby, we didn't get much done and had to go back the next day. We showed up on time (another hour drive) to someone at the store who didn't know a thing about what was going on or how to quilt. We were told to go in and continue where we left off and the owner should be back soon. After sitting and chatting with my friend for 2 more hours the owner came in,asked what we had done so far. We were only suppose to be there for 3 hours which at this time meant we had 1 hour to finish our runner. This wasn't going to happen we had a good 3 hours of work left and had no instructions to follow so couldn't even take our material and go home. I was willing to give her the benefit of a doubt that she might have had an unexpected emergency and could not contact us so that we could reschedule but after finding out that she went to lunch with some friends and was having so much fun she stayed longer than she expected and left us to fend for ourselves I got a little upset. She did finally write down some directions (very hard to follow) we could take with us. I took mine to a LQS and told the owner what happened and she was a real peach and helped me finish my table runner. Needless to say we had to pay $70 for this so called personnel instruction class plus $20 for material from a shop I will never go to again. Lesson well learned.
I now have found a great guild that has tought me more than any class can. Gee thanks for listening sorry for the lengthy story but I feel so much better now knowing I'm not the only one with an ugly experience. Thanks to you quilters here and my new quilting friends I am enjoying my new hobby.