My Way class: Day 1

OK, so it wasn't a full day. We started My Way last evening with just over 2 hours of class time. So far, I'm really enjoying Carolyn Mitchell's teaching style. She's not really teaching how to do each stitch, but rather helping us all with our color and thread choices, working through one block at a time. It's really amazing to see all of the color palettes everyone's chosen.

Last night we talked through and started stitching "Block A". Here is my My Way before class. The little blocks in the corners of the squares were the latest assigned prework. We were asked to have at least one done in each square.
It turned out that Block A was my least favorite block on the original design, because the color balance didn't seem right with the rest of the piece. Block A is the upper left block in the picture I posted here (though I moved mine to one of the two center blocks). Most of the other blocks used neutrals for the majority of the main cross, but this one was in a much brighter color family. I wanted to change it around so it fit in better with the rest of the design. As a result, I couldn't stick with the formulas in the instructions for "color family A goes here, color family B goes here", and spent a lot of time trying to figure out what I was going to do. I am going to work the cross portion in the "neutrals" family (the blue-gray of the border), and I'm going to have the values change from dark to light as I work in towards the center.

Here's the little bit I was able to finish last night. I actually have to take out a bit of the center waffle stitch because the second-to-last color (just inside the burgundy) seems to fall flat. I think I'm going to punch it up with a bit of metallic.
Now, I've got to go. I'd like to fix that waffle stitch before class starts at 9AM!