hand work day and drawing class

Yesterday, I spent a lovely day hand sewing and chatting at a friend's house. It is nice to spend time with friends, especially when it's a miserable day outside. I came home feeling all relaxed. As usual, I can't show what I was doing, but I took a couple of photos of some work by my friend, Anne.. Last summer, while visiting with friends at the cottage we sat around and put together color packs from a stash of fabrics. That is so much fun! Here is the result of one such grouping in string blocks. My friend, Anne did them in preparation for a quilt as you go workshop.

Anne also did these pennies in the little mat. The color is a little brighter than what my picture shows. she does like her purples and fuchsias.

There are a lot of 'pennies' around right now as there was just a workshop through our guild. I wasn't really interested at first, but when I dropped in and saw all the bins filled with all the colorful pennies it kind of grabbed me. I'm not really big on country design or colors; however, there were some really bright colors too. I started to think of lots of ideas for using the pennies in different ways. I'm doing a few for fun to add to the front of a needle case.
This morning I had 2 friends in for drawing lessons. We worked today on design and composition with a small still life. Every session is started with some warm up sketches. You can see 2 examples here (1 done by each person) of blind and modified contours.