Today was the first day of my class – City Lake taught by Gail Stafford. It turns out that Sharon B is also in the class and is the Class Angel.

We were given a line drawn canvas with a few areas already painted. One of our first assignments was to paint the sky using acrylic paints. Painting is not one of my accomplishments so I was particularly intimidated but it turned out okay. We started on some stitching and then had to draw the outlines of the trees onto ultrasuede using carbon paper. Who actually remembers carbon paper?

Here’s my progress at lunchtime today.

After lunch we painted the trees we had traced onto the ultrasuede. If I characterized myself as intimidated by the sky I would have to say I was traumatized by painting trees! We had to shade the trees and get some color variation as well. We will attach the trees tomorrow.

The rest of the afternoon was spent stitching other areas and there was a lot of random stitching, again not my specialty. But I think I’m off to a good start. So here’s my piece at the end of Day One. I’m going to clean up some of the spaghetti tonight to prepare for whatever Gail has in store for us tomorrow.