Creative weekend.

I've been so busy I haven't had time to post, sorry folks. Being the last Friday of the month, meant the new fast fabric challenge was issued. This month the theme is Jabberwock, abstract and texture. For me this is a fantastic theme, right up my street. Interestingly the idea appeared almost fully formed, I've only made some very subtle changes to my initial concept. I've made the background and I have a lot of the details well underway. As before I don't feel I can show anything here until it is finished, but given the deadline is Friday you don't have too long to wait.

I also had my first drawing lesson on Friday. It was an interesting experience. My teacher thinks that my problem is confidence or a lack there of. Apparently I am very hesitant when I need to draw anything. I wondered at the time if it was just having someone watching, but it seems to be true even when I am working on my own. It's very odd, but hopefully by knowing there is a problem I can try to fix it. I also tend to work quite small with drawing, quite the opposite to my quilting, so I am trying to use charcoal for drawing. It forces me to not only draw larger but also make more confident strokes. I have to admit I don't really like it but it does seem to help so I will try to stick with it.

I seem to have spent the whole weekend alternating between trying to draw and preparing the challenge quilt. Another fun aspect of the challenge is that I am using the same fabrics as last month which has saved me making more mess, and in fact helped me tidy up.

To get the week off to a good start, our two person quilt entry at the NEC is in Popular Patchwork. I guess it will be on sale in the shops in about a week, as a subscriber I get mine early. It is a nice little piece, showing both of the quilts, but they are upside down. Fortunately they are just geometeric patterns so it doesn't really matter. I was also pleased to see the magazine photographer found them quite tricky to photograph. It does seem that my preferred designs and colours are about the worst things to reproduce. Black and white both hide your quilting and white never looks white once you take a picture. Still it is exciting to see another quilt in the magazine, and very nice to have it pointed out that ours was a true joint effort. We both worked on everything.