After the initial talk, and a look at some beautiful samples Wendy, the teacher, had brought along, the first thing I produced was this:

It nearly induced a tantrum because I am the most impatient person in the world and don’t like it when I can’t do something straight away. (Older, yes, more mature, no.)

Wendy helped me with a few tension issues (the machine’s, not in fact mine), and I managed to start doing things like this:

Most pleasing.

And that then progressed to zig zag stitch and sewing strips of fabric into the design.

After lunch we did the Project. We started by using water soluble pastels to create a soft hued background on a rectangle drawn from a template. This could be framed later to neaten up the edges. Once that had dried, we used various bits of fabric and threads to create a scene, in my case the moon on the water. (No credit for the idea as it was pretty much what Wendy showed us as an example.)

The feeling of excitement and pleasure I get just from managing to stitch a satisfactory line makes me think this could be something I can really use. I am in love with mixed media art anyway, I just needed to learn how the heck to do it.