Class with Pat Pauly

The last week was spent preparing for and then taking a two day class from Pat Pauly (www.PatPauly.com), our local design guru/mentor and RAFA spiritual leader! I spent a couple of days using up all of the ink in my printer! As a result I had a rich assortment of photos for the class. As usual, I didn't read the instructions very carefully and didn't bring enough of the right fabrics to put a piece together -- this was not helped by the fact that I had no idea which photo I would use and I had about 30!!

We had about 8 people and met at Pat's house which she had well set up to accommodate us with no problem. Because of the illness of one of our valued members, the original studio we were to use was not available (but she is better now).

We spent the first morning looking at slides and taking sample pictures and using a mask to select portions of the picture which we then cut out and arranged into {hopefully} pleasing compositions. We then selected a picture from our own stash and started auditioning fabric trying to keep the proportions pretty much in keeping with the pictures.

This is Anne Fischer's piece at the end of Day 2. She fell in love with one piece of fabric that she wanted to use so it ended up being smaller than some of the other pieces. It was very graphic and a wonderful composition (I thought).
This is the start to Jeanne Simpson's piece. She of course tempted us with many bolts of beautiful cottons -- yes, I succumbed to the temptation!


I again chose (big surprise) my favorite Yellowstone picture which has been on this blog about 10 times already. I had a good assortment of fabric which was my main driver in the selection process at this point. Of course, I didn't have any more complex solids or prints so after day 1, again brought even more fabric to Pat's!


This was my piece at the beginning of Day 2. I had a mountain thing going in that upper right quadrant which I didn't like and neither did Pat. She said it is very difficult to get away from being a "landscape" with the long horizontal lines and we determined that they should be broken up. I did this and ended up with buildings instead so went on to the next draft. This was the "first draft".

This is the second draft which still wasn't right. It was just too dark in the upper left quadrant and the lower right. It still looks a bit like a landscape although I have broken up the dark blue. At this point, I looked at it through the camera and the light blue greys in the upper right and lower right really stuck out so it was obvious that color needed to be added to the upper left. Also the space needed to be broken up to reduce that landscape look.


This was my "third draft" and what I left the second day with. I am still not happy but do like the break up of the space in the upper left quadrant now. I have worked on it a bit more and have changed the lower left quadrant a bit as well. I still have work to do on the lower right quadrant and some more work on the upper left!! I am getting to the point (NOT in this picture) that I am beginning to like it after I did some work last night. There was some advice I read somewhere that every stitch and every piece of fabric should be placed with intent and mean something so I take that seriously now making sure I like everything -- that it feels right. I am definitely outside my comfort zone.