Hi, Everyone —

Today was the first day of my seminar class and it wasn’t at all what I expected.  Joan Thomasson is the very sweet lady who is teaching this class.  Our kit consists of two blank canvases and about 50 skeins of DMC and silk flosses.  WOW — every color but blue!

First off, we had to paint our canvas — we did this by painting on paper and then ironing the paper to transfer the paint to the canvas.  The paints got really bright with the heat of the iron.  One canvas was blank except for an area which we had screened from paint by pinning on a cutout of the cardinals in the tree.  On the second one, we had to trace the overall design onto the canvas before ironing the canvas.  Joan challenged us to pick the one that we then wanted to stitch.  She lost me at “paint” — not to mention “iron” or “trace” or “choose”.

Anyway, you will see by my choice of canvas, that I painted a lot of blue into the sky.  So at the first break I had to run to the store to buy some blue thread — Sue can tell you that I had nightmares about HAVING to go to the store for this class.  All true.  So — finally, after the break, we started stitching the male cardinal.  Random long and short stitches, buttonhole stitches that I hadn’t done before, and satin thread.  Now this is what you would call a nightmare in the middle of the day!  After lunch, we finished the cardinal and moved on to flowers — another new stitch — the Lazy Daisy.  My chest hurt, me head ached!  But still — I think the result turned out okay.

First Day Progress on Cardinals in the Garden

So…when Sue got back to the room, she could tell that I was feeling pretty gloomy.  We took out our SOTM since neither of us had any homework and IMMEDIATELY I felt better — this is the kind of stitching I like to do.  How therapeutic!!!

Around 6:30 we decided to walk around to find a place for dinner.  We ended up at Bistro 301 — we had tried to get a reservation there on Saturday, but the wait was a few hours long!  What a delicious meal we had tonight.  Sue had a local vegetable risotto and I had a salad with grilled chicken, brie, candied pecans, grapes, and apples.  We walked past the Fifth Third Bank on the way home.  Hmmm.

So all is well as we prepare for bedtime.

Cheers!  Rosie