Stretching yourself

Today and tomorrow I'm taking an embroidery class.  The teacher is from France and speaks no English, but many of the other participants are bilingual and are very good about providing translation.  Several years ago I, more or less, left my embroidery behind.  My arthritic hands just couldn't manage the very fine, fussy detailed work that I so very much loved.  Since then I've done some coarser, fairly basic embroidery in some of my fibre pieces, but today it was back to very fine work, with a single strand of silk perle smaller than #12,  through heavy wool fabric layered with acetate taffeta.  It didn't take long until the old skills emerged.  My poor vision turned out to be more of a problem than the work itself. 

It was like coming home again.  Euphoria!  Now, I know that the pain will return if I keep it up.  I'm concerned about having the tolerance to finish tomorrow's class.  But for this small period of time  I'm able to go back to a time in my life that has many varied and fond memories for me

Scraps

The sunprinting my granddaughters did has been made into tote bags for them and they are quite happy.  But I was left with a pile of painted scraps.  I carefully cut the scraps into small rectangular pieces and fused them onto black, for another quilted piece.  I've titled it "Chaos Theory II: Painting With Children"  Now the pieces have to be stitched down--which will be a real bother (I almost used another word).  Once I got them fused down, the piece, itself,  told me to turn it 180 degrees.  It was right!  I much prefer the hanging swirl, to the grounded swirl.