"Inspiration from the North"

This is a class Sarah and I went to yesterday in Lerwick. Out teacher, Rosalind Johanson, had traveled up from England. The idea was to be inspired by what's around you, sea, sky, the beautiful knitting that's produced up here ...... alsorts of things. Of course I forgot to take my pictures in with me so I was working from memory. I had set out to do an applique picture of a puffin but this is what came off the sewing machine !!. The picture on the left is what I have so far but I'm not too sure about it. I think there's too much pale fabric. I have taken another couple of pictures with the pale folded out and I may slash the picture to cut out the lighter bits. Let me know what you think I should do ?  



     

Once I have decided on how much of the lighter strips to keep, I'll applique on a small house with a chimney and embroider on some subtle smoke swirls. I have also started this chevron boarder which will go outside the pencil border. I will then quilt in swirls around the smoke to represent the wind. I also had the idea of cutting the edge of the quilt kind of wavy and making some bias binding to edge it .... but that was yesterdays idea and I may have chosen something different by tomorrow.

I'm now in the process of cutting out the border strips. (No I'm not cutting straight on to the table, I had removed the board for the sake of the photo as it was scruffy looking).

So there we go. On Friday we had a lock-in at the shop and quilted for 4 hours straight and yesterday I was at a quilting class. Can life get any better ?