I've been busy!

I have been to the Ballarat Fibre Forum for 2012.  It goes for a week, doing the one workshop, giving plenty of time to learn techniques and practise them.  I was lucky enough to go to Jane Sassaman's class.  I chose it because the first few days were devoted to designing using flowers as your inspiration.
It was advertised for the 'drawing impaired and tragically literal'.  Not that I am totally those things but I can always do with some help with drawing and design.
We did a few exercises where we really looked at the flower we had chosen as our inspiration and worked out what shapes we could see, what pattern is in the design of the petal placements, etc.
I took lots of lovely pictures of canna lilies and poppies.  I had spent ages going through my pictures. I even went to the Garden and Flower show.  Then I put in fabrics that I thought would be useful.  Oranges, yellows and reds. Greens for the leaves.  Maybe some browns would be necessary.

These are the images I planned to use.

                      

I also threw in some contrasting colours in case I decided to go abstract.  Thank goodness I did!  The pictures I chose were totally different and I only had them because they were in a visual diary I threw in at the last minute.
I'll post more about the drawing and designs next.