I have red

Let the rest of the painting commence!

Playing with Paints

Yesterday I managed to finish off the stitch experiment with shades, hues and tints. That is all the stitching done for chapter five, but before I creep on to chapter six I get to play with paints for a while :)

I dug out some tubes of acrylics that I've had lying around for years, but somewhere along the line red has gone astray. I know I had red at some point as I remember using it but it's just not with the rest so I've stalled until red can be bought. Hopefully 'the old man' will be able to find some in town during his lunch break today.

Time Flies

Wow, I didn't realise that it had been almost a week since I posted here doesn't time fly. I had a really lazy weekend and I've been battling the blues the last couple of days which always makes me feel lethargic and uninspired. Thankfully I think I'm snapping out of it and I'm starting to get to work again.

My colour wheels are done, and I'm now stitching out a sample exploring tints and shades.
It's an interesting experiment.

Plenty of Firsts

The thing that I'm loving about this course is that because I've not really been that adept at using my machine there are so many new things for me to do, so many firsts.

I've never really done any real study of colour before. I was never any good at art at school, the art teacher told me so and was one of those that instead of trying to encourage those with lesser abilities just concentrated all her energies on the talented students and let the rest of us struggle on.
I've certainly never stitched with 2 threads through the needle before - and this is one of the things that I'm getting to do in making my second stitched colour wheel for this chapter. I'm not sure that the colour mixing segments are looking all that great, but it is an interesting exercise.
The set up in the first picture wasn't really working for me with this thread. It's so shiny and slippery that it just kept falling off the spool and getting tangled up tight round the spindle it was sat on. So I switched to just throwing it in a bowl by the side of my machine and this worked a lot better.
All in all I'm having fun again, the disappointment of the bluebells has been forgotten. The last few days I've been noticing the wild poppies springing up along the roadsides, maybe there will be a poppy piece in my future ;-) or maybe I should stay clear of the flora for a while ;-) For the time being I see plenty more colour play in my immediate future. My little aim is to finish chapter five before the week is out.

Back on the Horse

Module One Chapter Four - Zig Zag Stitch and Automatic Patterns

Chapter Four is complete :)

I'm not sure what is happening with the photo upload though these pictures were all taken the same way on my camera but some of them have uploaded the wrong way round again!

Thinking caps to the ready

Some you win, some not so much. I've almost finished stitching the bluebell piece and after a fairly promising start I'm pretty disappointed with how it's come out.

This is a really ropey picture of me last night putting my poor tired brain through it's paces trying to think of ways that I could improve the piece if I did it again. As per usual I have a fair bit to say. Until now I've been hand writing my notes in the workbook but after a conversation with my friend Sue on Thursday about how long I'm spending trying to organise my thoughts and write them up I think I'm going to try something different this time. I'll be typing my notes on to computer that way I'll have the ability to pour out my randomness and then cut and paste in to some sort of logical order. Maybe this will save me a bit of write up time and leave more time for stitching ... we'll see :)