Beautiful leaf stain and leaves

 Found on Betsy's driveway in N. Carolina.  Just love the stain image!

Christmas cards and work from Heather Held's Workshop

 This workshop was a delight and I used what I learned for my Christmas card, above

New Dragonfly Collage

 This was another of my Dragonfly series.  Made mostly with my handmade and altered papers with the dragonfly transfers.  Yes, I love greens!

Stamptastic Tiny Workshop with the Chicago Calligraphy Collective

 This photo is of my samples.  The stamps are made of fun foam with adhesive backing- the kind you find for kids!  In one I added pen and ink lines to adhance the card.

 Some of the student's work.  The creative part is what you do with the stamps you create and these were beautiful!  They repeated the stamp with different colors and arranged them on cards.

This one uses the left over scraps and she printed with separate colors to make a spectacular card!

Tiny Workshops with the Chicago Callig Collective

I took the jewelry making workshop- the second photo is the "homework" we had to bring for the pages of the necklace we made.  What a fun class!! And it was really easy to make!

Pen and Ink

 Still working on these- top one is my garden gate in pen and ink and the second is at another garden with watercolor added and the pen and ink is very light.

Sycamore Leaf

Another painting started in our Plein air sketch class

New Envelopes

 Sorry, photo turned.  Working with gold ink was nice!  I feel the lettering came out pretty good.

Little Red Schoolhouse

 Almost forgot to include my photo of the Schoolhouse for the previous post!

  The other picture was a house that would be fun to paint but the wild flowers were too high.  Had to hold my camera way up in the air to get this.

Little Red Schoolhouse

 Path at the Little Red Schoolhouse.  What a wonderful place to take kids and its all free.  They have a new building but the old one was closed for renovation.  It will be nice to have that still open as it was there when I was young and visited with the girl scouts!

Our last plein aire class met at the Little Red Schoolhouse -had to have our critique at a nearby forest preserve.  The weather was ideal and even cool in the shade that day.  We always luck out with the weather! I should have taken more photos of all the wonderful work, done in pencil, watercolor and pen and ink.

Plein Aire group at my yard

 Thirteen people came and what a georgeous day in the 70's.

 My pen and ink.  Someone opened the gate and it looked so inviting.

 Luce's beautiful watercolors which she starts with a wash of color and subtle bright colors for the flowers and leaves.

 Three of Sandy's flowers-two pen and ink and one watercolor

 Joan did the iron bunny!

 Peggy always picks out something unique to draw.

 Lastly, Lois' (the teacher) perspective drawing of the back of the house.

Watercolors from our sketch class -Grau Mill and Cantigny

 Colors are still quite light -we work outside on site and get as much done as we have time for.  I'll work to finish them on my own.

My work from Peter Thornton's Workshop

This was the last thing I did in class-trying to try to get the watercolor step started to finish the quote.  The pressure and release letters were the variations we learned.  If you enlarge, you'll see the lined paper we put underneath the top sheet which helped save time to not measure and draw lines.

One of my practice sheets (sorry it was sideways)

Two more practice sheets -which are pages that will be sewn into a book form.  The top -the traditional caps and the bottom shows some of the variations which in this case are based on the oval shape.

A little of the pen work we did.

Peter Thornton Workshop

 As always, Peter's workshop was wonderful.  He used the folded pen to letter our names on the cover of our books which hold all our notes and practice pages.

On the first day we worked with HB pencils, drawing upper case letters.  First on the basic "Trajan Capitals" and then on to other variations.  Then using the 2B pencil, we worked on the Pressure and Release style making more practice pages for our books.  It's always nice to put the pages into book form to use as a reference later.
Sunday we moved to the pen and with Peter's fabulous pen work demos, we worked hard to make our letters look like his!  I've shown the M, N etc, done by him.

We ran out of time before we got our pages sewn together, but I'll do that before the time gets away, and hopefully won't put it off.  I have too many unfinished things from workshops.  

Working on my quilt again!

I have ten squares finished on my Pineapple quilt, and found more of the dark navy fabric on my trip to NC. so will get back to it finally!