Today was Day 1 of Suzanne Howren's and Tony Mineri's Creative Collage class. I have really been looking forward to this class as many of you know since I love working on painted canvases using my own stitch guides. However, my skills in this area were very limited.

While the day started with receiving our canvas and threads. We examined the canvas as well as several others in terms of which elements were in the foreground, middle ground, and background. This is important in determining the weight and colors of stitches and threads to use. What became apparent to me is that where items sit is different than the focal point of the canvas.

Next we were given graph paper with a teardrop and another with an irregular figure (think amoeba!) and had to figure out what stitches were most appropriate for each figure that would be consistent with its direction while emphasizing its shape and direction. This took a lot of trial and error, erasing, color pencils, etc. who knew how difficult yet how obvious once you found an appropriate stitch. We then played around a lot with trellis type stitches. The big aha for me was you don't have to treat it as a trellis – it's a style of stitch combinations. You can provide as much or as little coverage as appropriate for the area of canvas you're covering. This is a great technique for covering variable colored areas where the color is not intricate to the picture. We finished the day talking about background stitches and threads.

As you can see, we spent the day using our brains to figure out the best way to work with a painted canvas and did no stitching. There was so much information shared which triggered so many ideas that I was exhausted!

This was my first class with either Suzanne or Tony. They are a wealth of knowledge and ideas. They readily answered questions, eyed our ideas and helped us flesh them out to do what we wanted. I can't wait to see what tomorrow brings!

Diane

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