Class Pieces from seminar

In Monday's post, I mentioned the two classes I had taken, but didn't show any progress pictures on them. We made quite a bit of progress on Kathy Fenchel's Picnic Hampered! in class.
While all of the raised work is a bit of a challenge, the most challenging part is the tree! I'm an engineer, so my brain has been trained to work in straight lines. This works wonderfully for charted pieces, geometrics, etc. Kathy urged us to make our trees look natural, the more gnarled the better - i.e. messy. So, I tacked down some brown felt (used to pad the basket) to add some lumpiness to the tree, and started to stitch up the tree in all the colors of brown and black in the kit. This uses chain stitch, stem stitch, outline stitch, and wrapped backstitch. I'm leaving the thread ends out front, and stitching right over them. If they get wrapped up in the stitches, all the better! So, while messy is not a word I frequent in my stitching vocabulary, I'm trying my hardest to make it so. And part of that is just not trying - just letting it happen.

The other class plays more to my neat and precise stitching mind (although my family will tell you that I'm rarely neat anywhere else!). Here is the bit of progress made on Catherine Theron's Examplar IV. Since then I've finished the strawberry stems all the way around, and have started to add the curliques to the vine.

Four of us took these two classes, and the other three all agreed with me when I mentioned that while both of these pieces were going to be a challenge, they both suited a different stitching mood. As a result, both will have their place in my (rather loose) stitching rotation.