Jae Maries - Weekend Course

This weekend I was on a course, amongst old friends and new, with tutor Jae Maries.
Not been on a course in a while and this came along and was much needed.
As always with a workshop it isn't always the main topic which provides the elements of wow, that is just such a good idea.  One thing which fascinated me, was sitting opposite Deirdre and watching her sharpen a pencil.  As a former draughtswoman, she is used to precision tools and accuracy, but I'd never seen anyone do this before.  First she sharpened with a knife, then used sandpaper to refine to a very sharp long point.
Deirdre was also the provider of sighs of awwww at the end of the first day.  We had the doors open and were visited by a cat who lives next door to the venue.  It patrolled round and round inspecting, and was quite happy.  When we came to leave for the evening Deirdre found him in her bag, curled up asleep.  Good job she needed that bag otherwise no-one would have known, we thought he'd left.  He did come in again on Sunday, but this time was escorted out!

Jae was very good with her time, devoting lots of inspiration and ideas to each person.  Though many people came in on Sunday declaring, "I've changed my mind, starting over".  Me included - I think many of us had a sleepless night, in terms of ideas buzzing or just realising doing the design process in the wrong order, or too precise.  We were supposed to be loose with our interpretations, scale, colour choice - well considered but not slave like reconstruction.
I started off with some of these

Sunday we had an excellent lunch together.  We also had more information from Jae, this time excellent hints and tips on mounting/presenting work, which I want to try.
I came home with a piece of work prepped ready to sew - I didn't start sewing because I was tired and didn't want to spoil it.

This is final designing stage

its going to look a lot different from the starting point!

 

Thank you everyone for your excellent company, lunch and extending the opportunity my way.