FMMS Sketchbook | Autumn at Olive Ave

I’ve had fun showing you all my Free Motion Machine Sketched Sketchbooks with you, and I saved the best for last, Autumn at Olive Ave!

It was designed to hold all the motifs I wanted to stitch on the DVD, so it needed to have at least 3 different birds, 3 different vessels and 3 different botanicals, each group containing motifs with increasing level of difficulty. I chose the palette I’ve been loving for awhile know, Autumn Splendor:

and since just about everything in the book can be found in or around my house, the name reflects the colors and the location (I live on Olive Avenue). The front page contains a frond of Fennel:

Next up is a milk bottle (I love the way I stitched the word Milk) and a simple bird:

The next two pages have some Meyer Lemon leaves and a Quail,  I love the resonance of the opposite colors on these 2 pages!!!!

The center spread has one of my favorite things, a set of graduated bowls, and I love the contrast of the blue against the gold:

Next up is an Agapanthus and some Rosemary, both which grow really well in our yard:

It was fun to have the hummingbird flying towards the Jasmine, something else that happens with regular frequency in my backyard!

The book finishes with simple pitcher, I’ve got a lot of these around!

Funny story: When I planned for the DVD I had some rough timing estimates for every thing I wanted to do, but I also know that when I’m taping “for real” the odds are high that I’ll go faster than I do when practicing at home by myself with nobody watching. The DVDs can be a maximum of 75 minutes, and the rough estimates I had for the whole workshop was 70-75 minutes with 3 motifs in each of the 3 groups, but there are 11 pages in the book, so I had 2 motifs, Jasmine and Fennel, that I probably wouldn’t have time to tape. But I had everything ready to go in case we ran short. Helen also thought it would be good if we could shoot them to use for promotional materials as well if we had time at the end of the day. Most the the shooting that whole day at the studio involved me, they shot 6 segments of QATV, 4 of which were in me, and then my workshop. I was pretty darn busy all day long, (hah understatement!) but it didn’t seem like it was taking that long. So when we got to the end of my DVD and Kathy Stull the producer was excited that I’d hit 74 minutes, hooray! I was happy because I’d rememberd to say everything I wanted to! They took this picture right then:

Yup, I was happy! I then looked up at Helen and asked her if we were going to shoot the extra flowers, and she asked me if I knew what time it was. I had no idea…it was 6:30!!! Man, that day had FLOWN by…and no, we weren’t going to stick around for extra taping!

I hope you’ve enjoyed me sharing all my sketchbooks with you…don’t forget to enter my giveaway where you could win all the fabric plus my DVD so you could make one of your own!