busy as a bee

I've just started the "Sumptuous Surfaces" course taught by Sharon Boggon on Joggles.com. The first lesson involved designing your project - a novel idea for me as I tend to just jump in feet first and paddle like a puppy. This weekend I've spent the majority of my time sketching and doodling, manipulating images on the computer and trying to come up with a 4 x 6 inch design for my first project. Initially I was at a loss - plan something? how novel is that? And once I had what I thought was a plan, the notion of tranforming it into a stitch pattern simply boggled me.

I visited a nearby shop this afternoon to collect some new fibers for the project. The first project is monotones - preferably whites/ecrus and those colors just aren't in my vocabulary and I really didn't have many 'fancy' fibers to use. I went to the Shibori Dragon - oh my! it took my breath away - honestly. There were such beautiful fabrics and threads and I didn't even venture into the knitting room. I purchased some silks, rayons, overdyed cottons, wools and one skein of thread made of bamboo. They also had wonderful little bags of scraps for crazy quilting, so I had to add a couple of those to my pile. These bags were crammed full of wonderful treasures - most too small for me to use in my style of crazy quilting (read here - use BIG pieces of fabric to accodomdate big and clumbsy stitching) but this is just what I have longed to have in my fabric stash for fabric collage pieces -

When I came home I had a much better idea of what I wanted to do and came up with this:

Now to wait until the next class on Thursday to begin. I think though that it wouldn't hurt to work up a little stitch sampler before beginning the class piece.