Many Directions

Yes, more microspools. I am making a shift toward making more spools that have less value contrast. I am planning on having the upright spools be dark and the tipped over spools be lighter. I think the red spool in the fourth row, far left will be my model for the lighter value spools.

And poor sweet Molly has moved to the top of the shelving unit in the sewing room because it is now warm enough without her heated bed. Also, her pony is turning into an attention hog...and Molly doesn't think that is fair given what a short attention span her staff has.

Buddy comes up to me and calls me his Pony Pedestal because he likes to be held up my shoulder. He also likes Pony Playtime. He calls Molly his Pony Plunder.

And yes, I think the Puffin is straight forward enough for a tutorial. There are some tricky bits where seams have to match though. Usually I like to keep modifying the design until those parts of eliminated.

And this is how I work. I scribble around on graph paper until I get shapes that I like. I like this eye because it conveys a puffin eye without being hard to pieces. And I also like how the black flips from the head to the beak.

After I get the general cartoon settled, I break it down into sections for piecing. I make a lot of changes to the cartoon at this stage.

I should also mention that back in 2011, I was part of a 52 week challenge where I made a small fused quilt each week. I was learning Illustrator and I spent a lot of time refining and abstracting the cartoon for the pattern. Now when I design a pieced block, I used these fused pieces as my spring board because I have already abstracted the key characteristics.