Poppies...Poppies.

Well it has been another busy couple of weeks at Spring Valley Designs. I rather belatedly realized that my next teaching contract was for the weekend after the Memorial Day Weekend and I hadn't even started kitting. Oh, and we were out of town over the holiday! The class was supposed to be easy peasy because it was a design I did years ago and stitched on commercially available stitch cards. Or so I thought! They stopped making the particular stitch cards a few years back (nobody consulted me about this LOL) and discontinued all of their products earlier this year. So, after a bit of grumbling, I designed a new stitch card. And my poor husband had to spend a couple of evenings after work lasering them for me. But everything came together and the class went well.

This is the new needlebook

California Poppies 

And this past weekend I took a Catherine Jordan workshop that I have been wanting to do for ages but the stars had not aligned before. It was everything I had hoped for and I had a fabulous time with great people and an excellent teacher. She's a CZT too with basic Zentangle classes as well as some creative classes  combining Zentangle and stitching.

My Finished Forest

Painted Backgrounds For Future Forests

This week's Diva Challenge was to take inspiration from the Beads of Courage, the Color Run, or whatever gives you Courage. The Diva mentioned the #HeftyHack technique for coloring a background so I had to give it a shot. There were some very old Primacolor Scholar markers kicking around my studio so I used those. And when I say old, I mean over 10 years old. One of the purples has turned brown! But they were useful for this project and I was happy with the resulting background. I chose Helix since the pattern already looks like a string of beads and tangled away.

Tile Before Tangling

Tangle Used: Helix

I'm looking to forward to seeing what other people have done with this challenge.