I ordered The Complete Yurt Handbook by Paul King and it came today. I’ve only read a couple of chapters but it has tons of useful information in it. The first section of the book is about the history of yurts or ger and the different types. The second section is complete instructions on making one. So this book will come in really handy over the summer when we build our yurt.

Each of the chapters starts off with a poem about yurts. Here is one of the shorter ones:

I’m still adding stitching to the machine applique piece. I added more burnt orange and dark purple. It looks a little better but still not as I had envisioned it.

Perhaps I need to add some cable stitch to give a thicker line? What do you think?

Today, I spent most of the day working on a slide show presentation for a class I will be teaching in June. It is a beginning felting class that will be held at Flathead Valley Community College. I will let you know more as the details are available. I did get in a little more stitching on my cut back applique. I think I will end up with the entire piece covered by stitching. I did add some Stitch-N-Tear to the back to give it a bit more support for all that stitching.

 Here’s the entire piece. I added a burnt orange thread today.

Can you see it in there?

I didn’t have much time today due to errands and running around, plus we have a birthday dinner this evening for a friend. So I just got a few lines stitched on my applique piece. And it still is very unimpressive.

This photo is much more true to the color of the piece though. It certainly needs a lot more stitching to integrate those shapes together.

I started the last piece I need to complete for my stitch homework. It is another machine applique that is based on an inspiration. I found an interesting photo in Tafoni, a book that has the coolest photos in it. I loosely based my design on the photo and chose some fabric. I tried to get fabric that had a variety of values so when I cut back around the machine stitching, that there would be a noticeable difference.

Here is my stack of fabric. The top piece has much more yellow in it than this photo shows. I started by basting all three layers together.

Here you can see the different colors of fabric that I chose. That middle deep purple fabric is from my friend Vicki, she dyes beautiful fabric.

Here’s the book about tafoni. These are the holes that are worn into rocks by weather etc. I never knew this is what those holes were called but I’ve always loved them.

Here is the photo from Tafoni that I loosely based my design on. It actually will probably look nothing like this when I get done.

Here is what I’ve done so far. I am going to add more stitching as I really want to get the feel of the horizontal lines going through the rock in the photo. Somehow, the back fabric doesn’t really thrill me. That is the one on the top. But perhaps with more stitching, I’ll like it better.