When It Pays To Be A Blog...

stalker follower! It was late at night and I was doing my blog reading, when I noticed that Elaine Quehl, a fabulous quilt artist, dyer and teacher from here in Ottawa, had put up a new post on her blog. She was celebrating her first blogiversary, four years of teaching full-time and nine years of teaching and dying fabric. She had a giveaway to the first person to respond. Being the nimble-fingered person that I am, I quickly posted a comment and won a meter of Elaine's gorgeous hand dyed fabric! And she custom dyed it for me with my favourite colours - wine/burgundy/purple. Isn't absolutely luscious? Thank you so much, Elaine! I absolutely LOVE it and I've been staring at it lovingly and petting it regularly since bringing it home (come on, I know some of you do the same thing! :) )

Elaine and I with the luscious fabric she dyed for me!

She even hand delivered to me too...at the workshop I took yesterday with her (how's that for a segue?)! First full-day workshop for me in over three years! Woo hoo! I think the last workshop I took was Elaine's Reflections class. (Ottawa area peeps: She's offering it again in March through the Ottawa Valley Quilter's Guild - a great workshop definitely worth taking!) 

Yesterday, we were learning how to do collage trees. So fun! We had three of Elaine's patterns to choose from: Branching Out, Vagabond Song and Standing Still. I chose Branching Out. Here's where I am with my tree:

This is a major exercise in value, which I struggle with so I'm learning a lot. I find my lights are often too light and my darks are really mediums or vice versa. Often, I have too much contrast so I'm trying to work on that. It was really cool to see what the other participants were doing with their trees. I saw a variety of palettes -- reddish brown, gray, purple/blue-ish, and orange. All of them were beautiful! 

Branching Out is now up on my design wall for me to play with it some more. I think I'll try to do a little each day -- that seems to help me get the values more balanced (at least it helped with Don't Worry, Be Scrappy!). I think I'd like to do maple leaves on my tree. 

Speaking of trees, this is the view from our front door after the last couple of days of snowfall. Our winter wonderland!

Happy Sunday!