Seeing Is Believing

As you may have guessed after reading Saturday’s post, I need glasses.  I need glasses BAD!  I still can’t believe it!  I thought I had perfect vision.  I first detected a problem when I had to cover my left eye and read the alphabet chart.  Guess what…I couldn’t even read the top line with my right eye!  You know the line with the biggest letters??  Yep, it was a complete blur!  As a matter of fact, everything was blurry, near or far.  I kept saying to the technician, “I can’t understand why my eye is so blurry?  I could see just fine a minute ago.”  She was very kind and humored me.  Well, now it was time to check my left eye…not so good there either.  MUCH better than right, but not great.  I still couldn’t read the smaller letters.  Scott arrived just in time for the doctor to check things out and talk with me.  Apparently, I’ve needed glasses for a L-O-N-G time.  The doctor’s exact words were “you’ve probably needed glasses since preschool.”  I’m a little emotional at this point.  He asked me about headaches and fatigue.  Had I experienced them?  Yes and yes, as long as I can remember.  I’ve always had headaches.  Constant headaches.  Unexplained fatigue??  Yes!  I’ve been to the doctor dozens of times over the years and no one has ever mentioned that I should get my eyes checked.  I just lived with it.  I have a very strong astigmatism which left untreated as mine has been for the 30+ years was like a “leaky faucet” draining me of energy and causing headaches.  The doctor said “you’ll be amazed at how your quality of life will improve.”  Can you believe that???

Now for the fun part…picking out glasses.  I was in no mood to be picking out glasses at this point.  I had been in a hurry so I wore my hair curly, my face looked a wreck and my headache was back.  Needless to say I think I picked a cute pair out.  They’re a bit sassy and fun!  I just can’t wait to be able to see!  Scott was a big help picking them out!  Very supportive.  Scott has urged me for years to go to the eye doctor.  I should have listened to him a long time ago.  He never said, “I told you so!”  What a guy.  🙂

Now for class with Jamie on Saturday.  There were about 20 LA students there.  I guess I wasn’t sure what the class was because it turned out to be an introduction to fabric painting for portrait quilts.  Jamie basically took his 5 day workshop and condensed it into a 10 minute explanation.  There were students from all over, even one from Canada.  I loved meeting all the other LAers.  I met a new friend Bev that has an A-1.  She was super helpful and I plan on visiting her studio soon!  Anyways, we had to pick a flower to “color” in with either pencils, markers or paints.  We had about 4 different choices.  I chose the Morning Glory.

I am not at all familiar with this kind of “portrait” quilting.  I love to learn new things, though.  I was really nervous or intimidated because I don’t consider myself this kind of artist.  I don’t know the first thing about painting like this!!  I was definitely a fish out of water!! As it turns out, this is a very long process.  Many steps involved.  It takes a lot of layering of colors to make the portrait come to life!  My first layers.

Then Jamie walked around the room and held them up for critique from the class.  There were some amazing flowers!!  Some real artists in that room!  I wanted to sink under my chair when it was my turn!

Jamie critiquing a student’s flowers.

The group of ladies I rode with want to finish our flowers, so we can put them in a show as a group.  I have so much left to do.  We all did.  There are many more steps to the process.  Not sure if I’ll have the time.  We’ll see…