I have been a busy, busy girl. First we made a trip to Washington DC and on to Philadelphia for the Buyers Market of American Craft to buy for the store. I wrote a post about it over on the Felting and Fiber Studio site. We got home from Philly and then two days later drove over to La Conner, Washington to go to my stitch course with Gail Harker. When we got back after a week, I had my local surface design group at the house, a Brewfest fundraiser on Big Mountain and now we have company coming to visit. Never a dull moment. The photo above is a sari from the collection of Penny Peters who has traveled to India several times. She assists with our stitch class and since we were studying Kantha embroidery during the session, she showed us some wonderful examples. These are all done with running stitch. Who knew that the lowly running stitch could form so many patterns?

 This pattern really caught my eye. I love the geometric look of the center section. We studied the stitch, working in our sketchbooks. I’ll have to show sketchbook photos later.

 This one was really cool as well. The filling in the elephants and birds is done with all running stitch. This is another sari in Penny’s collection.

 For those of you who were asking about my Round Robin piece, I finally got it back. This isn’t a very good photo of it. I’ll have to get a better one. Louise added a variety of paper and paint and Bunny added copper metallic mesh and beads. It really turned out to be a beautiful piece.

For our play session at my house, we did paper mache, mainly because Carole had never done it before. I made little bitty cups of paper thinking I would use them for light covers on a string of Christmas type lights. However, as you can see from the photo, I only managed to complete four of them. As that would make for a very short string of lights, I’m not sure what I’m going to do with them.

I have finally gotten the book pages from the publisher to review. I’m sending those back soon and the book is still going to be out in August. I have another hat felting class scheduled at Camas Creek Yarn on March 23rd. I hope to get an advanced hat class worked out for some time this summer and perhaps a nuno felted jacket class. And then there’s the yurt. I think that I will only be able to get the designing portion of the yurt done this year. I had hoped to be able to start felting it this summer but with everything else on my plate, I don’t think I want to rush it. I am trying to stay focused as per my word for the year and I think I need to keep my focus on my stitch class. So yurt making will definitely be a two year project!

Don’t miss my upcoming post as it will be a celebration of my 400th post and I’ll be having a giveaway.