Day Three at the Crow Barn

I was raring to go on the second day of class because I was so happy to have kept up with the projects -- and I had found a Starbucks close to the hotel for my morning latte!

So that day started out like the first one, the assignment was posted on the wall, we all copied it down, Nancy explained it, and away we went.

Today's assignment was to use the fabrics we created yesterday afternoon to create two compositions. One of them was to be big, bold, and dramatic! The other was to be small and intensely busy.

I thought that this was going to be a piece of cake because this time I remembered to create strip-pieced fabrics that had "lines" (thin strips) on the outer edges. Wrong!

This is where the gnashing of teeth and hair tearing started. I started with the big and bold design because in order to be dramatic, I'd need large pieces of solid color and if I started to cut them up for a small busy piece, I may not have the right thing for the larger piece.

I think I must have pinned a design on the wall and then taken it completely apart at least 3 times. I was really wishing for that flannel sheet for the wall now. And even though Nancy thought my color choices were fantastic, the same could not be said about my design! Arrgh. The time went by so quickly. We had to have the two compositions completely sewn together by 9:00am the next morning because then we'd have a critique.

I finally settled on a design that I liked reasonably well and set to sew it together. Hmm . . not as easy as I thought, but I just tackled it bit by bit until I had it done. Whew.

But then, egads, now I had to create the small busy piece and I was running out of time. So I threw something together and hoped it would do. I think I left the barn at 9:00pm that night. (The Shaw Inn locks their door at 9:30pm so I had to get back before that.)

So here are the two pieces I ended up with. I do like the large one but the small one you can tell was just thrown together.



One of the questions we had to answer during the critique was if we were satisfied with the composition of the small piece or was it something that we just threw together to get it done! Obviously, I was not the only one who had problems with time.

For the critique we all moved around the room to each person's work area where that person had to stand by their work and be photographed (Nancy encouraged everyone to take pictures of the work of everyone else for reference -- but NOT for posting on blogs). Then the person had to answer the questions that Nancy posed in an articulate and thoughtful manner! I don't remember the specific questions but they were generally about explaining how we met the assignment requirements and how we interpreted them. I'm not sure I was too articulate, but I survived it. ;-)

I was happy to head back down the driveway to the inn at the end of the day. Ready to fall into bed.