Friday Favs

Wednesday I received the first lesson in Sumptuous Surface Design from Sharon B.  I had enrolled in the Yahoo class group a couple of weeks before and had been following the discussions.  Most had been on crazy quilt embroidery and I was getting more and more concerned.  I was not interested in just learning a bunch of crazy stitches.  Reading the lesson was a very pleasant surprise.  It was not only NOT a bunch of crazy stitches it was actually an art lesson!  She wrote about the 3 basic steps in design--concept, form, and content.  I have taken college art classes that did not do near as good of a job in presenting design process!  This is going to be an exciting class!!

So my Friday Favorites this week starts with embroidery, moves into art lessons, and then finishes with some tutorials.

Embroidery: 
Arlee Barr shares several looks at her Raggedy Black Heart.  I was just gonna give you the general address so you could cruise through the several posts with pictures but she has posted several pages on top of them. So, I will give you the first one and you can use her handy little arrow to see the others.  The nice thing about the multiple posts is that Arlee talks a bit about her process in working on the piece.


I will warn you right up front that The Silly BooDilly is working with handmade paper and not fabric but I really like the weaving she has done on the paper.  If you don't want to look at paper, don't check out her site.  But I think the technique could be used on fabric equally effectively. 


Art Lessons:
Judy Martin and her quilting group has been working on Mended World for close to 2 years now and it is finally almost finished.  It clearly has deserved the time spent on it.  Very quietly powerful.  Anyway, she gives a short design lesson as she evaluates the piece.

Novembergrass is one of my newer finds.  All of her postings are worth looking at if you are interested in incorporating stitch in your design.  I put her under art lessons because she talks about a focal point in this post.   As I struggle to balance my foreground and background so that I have a focal point plus other interesting things to look at in the design, I appreciate her thinking about a focal point.

Tutorials: 
 Nina Marie, another relatively new find for me, has just completed a class with Jane Dunnewold and passes along what she has learned about dyeing fabric in two post.  ONE and TWO  Everyone has their own techniques and I might have ignored her post if she hadn't told me that it was based on Jane's workshop.  And, you know, I learned a thing or two.

I hope  you keep learning new things too!  Makes life much  more interesting, doesn't it?