Abstracting from Nature with Jane Sassaman

I had the pleasure of taking Jane Sassaman's Abstracting from Nature workshop at the Hudson River Valley Art workshops this past week with 12 other ladies.  The weather man welcomed us to Greenville with a snow storm that began at noon on Sunday just as I parked my car in the Inn parking lot.  By Tuesday morning about 30 cms of snow had fallen and my car was buried

This lump is my car.  By lunch time, the snow removal man had it cleared off and the area around it shoveled.

The week started with us picking a flower and looking at its parts and sketching.  From there we did a number of exercises to abstract the shapes and come up with possible design elements.

 On Tuesday we started to make shapes for our designs

And on Wednesday we started to figure out how to put the different pieces together.  It took all day and some significant help from Jane to get to this.  There were a lot of pictures taken along the way and my 5 flowers became 13.  In this one the white elements are still pieces of paper.  Later they did get replaced by fabric.

 On Thursday, the sewing machines came out and the elements started to get stitched.  It took all day but by the end of the day all my elements were done and I had assembled the grey seed pod.  As much as I wanted to stitch the brown one, it had to wait until Friday morning as I was tired. 

 By dinner time on Friday I had all of this plus the two leaves and final side stitched down. 

 In this picture not all the flowers are sewn down.  There are still 8 more to go.  I'll work on them later this week and hope to have this ready to quilt soon.  The piece will get cropped slightly as I made it a bit oversized.  A small piece of the brown pod will be removed and the stem of the leaves will be at the bottom of the piece.

The workshop is hosted by the Greenville Arms 1889 Inn.  The food was excellent and the room was comfortable.  I'm looking forward to going back for another workshop in the future.