Jacket Progress and Class with Flavin Glover

Just so my northern friends won't think everything is peachy down here.  This is the fountain at the Arboretum where we had our class on Saturday!  We have been having very chilly weather here the last week although it was in the 60s today!

Well, I am making progress on the jacket.  I haven't cut out the black pieces to finish off the front and sides.  I am not happy with the black in the middle but am at a loss right now as to how to improve it.  Might be some hand applique involved.

I pinned up the sleeve to see how it hung together.  It kind of looks like a marching band uniform to me but hopefully won't look like that when I wear it.  I had a very definite event in mind to wear this jacket to as it is all silk and hopefully I will have the guts to do that when the time comes!

Saturday I took a really fun class with Flavin Glover.  She was just lovely and the class was really fun.  I really only took it to support the guild and to get to know people a little better.  The class was basically using her patterns to build little log cabin houses and was just fun.  Of course I approached it totally differently than anyone else in class did!!  I do travel to a different beat sometimes -- it never even occurred to me to do what the others were doing (which I didn't discover until the class was wrapping up).  They were all building whole houses, one at a time.  As I was sitting alone at a table (I got there later than most), I only knew what the person next to me was doing and she was doing a lot of planning.

Here is Flavin pinning up all the houses that the class did.  Mine are noticeably missing as I didn't make a full house at all but just started making the log cabin blocks called for in the pattern I was using (one of hers).  There were three different types of block and I was concentrating on efficiently doing just one type.

Well, the class made 54 blocks (the other 13 people) while I made 19 by myself. Of course mine don't look like houses yet!!  The beginnings are up on my design wall.  I am using some miscellaneous fat quarters of ugly marbled fabrics and fat quarters of many dye experiments done early in my dyeing history.  I used to do fat quarters almost exclusively but now don't dye less than a half yard of any color and try to do large pieces even for my marbled fabrics.  The marbled fabrics I brought down here are mainly rejects and meant to be cut up and this was ideal.  I needed some relaxing sewing after working with the tempermental silks.

This is the pattern I am using.  The large medium grey areas are trees.  I haven't decided yet whether I am actually going to do the log cabins that make up the sky.  If I can find enough different shades of blue, I might.  Otherwise I might just piece a large curvy piece in parts of the area.  We shall see.  I am not anxious to put in gobs of time and doing log cabins using the same fabric is just plain boring to do!