Wow, what a weekend that was. I attended a two and half day workshop on leadership with an emphasis on sustainability as a ideal. I learned all about Chaordic Decision making, a self-assessment tool, and how to be an effective storyteller, listener or witness. I learned what sort of leadership capacities I have some skills in and what needs work.

On my walk in on the first day, I stumbled across this broken piece of wasp's nest. It is so cool and it can really work with a birch bark project I am struggling to get rolling. It is very fragile. I am wondering if there is a way to strengthen it to stitch in without ruining it's fragile appearance.

The second day we learned a very cool way to gather lots of questions into themes and from that formulate them into powerful questions. Everyone was invited to write as many questions as they liked on a certain topic. Each question was on a sticky note. One person read out a question and others in the group who had a similar question clustered towards a themes. Themes in this case were Advice, Heroes/heroines, the future, work challenges and so on.

I've moved both sleeves onto one needle so that I can increase, decrease and shape each side the same. I had hopes to do some knitting when I returned home in the evenings, but I was so zonked, I just watched a video. Same on Sunday.

Luckily, I do have a couple of images for you. I've sketched and enlarged the next picture I am about to embroider on a hanky.

The close up shows a small gathering of animals often found in gardens. It is linked to my project on allotment gardens. I have not yet been in any garden when all these animals have gathered at one time, but I can live in hope.

I also found my stack of hankies and pulled out the ones I think will do nicely for this project.

On my mountain ash/rose hip squish piece, I found a magazine picture of a watering can. I want to sketch this and enlarge it a bit, then add it to this "garden path"

The object alongside the watering can is a very old style watering butt. It holds a large amount of water that can be wheeled to different areas of a garden. The smaller watering cans can be dipped into it. It prevents having to walk back and forth to taps and hoses. It's too bad we don't have this sort of thing today.

And now to chose the threads for the animals in the garden. This is a great part of any project. Lots of threads all over the place and maybe some fabrics to applique. Yum.