I'm a little late to the party today, that is the Slow Sunday Stitching party, but I was slowly stitching away on the Christmas stocking for my granddaughter and finished the deer.  The weird blank spot in the middle of the deer is where the wolf will be.  The next step is to get the snow around the bear done, back stitch the bear, and then stitch the wolf.  Those will be my goals for this week, along with a few others that I'll mention further done in the post.  Let me tell you that changing floss color every few stitches makes for very slow stitching. 

I also did some English paper piecing this week working on my La Passacaglia.  I finished Rosette 1 and have started on the next rosette, probably number 3 as it is joined to Rosette 1.  The top picture is the completed one and the next picture is my WIP (work in progress).  More slow stitching as it is all hand stitched.  Goal two will be to try and finished this WIP, but probably won't happen as it is very time consuming and this one has 8 rounds.

Now something that is fairly new to me is color value.  Marsha over at Quilter in Motion told me about taking a black and white picture of her work and seeing the color value of the fabrics.  In doing this you can see whether the fabric is dark, medium, or light in value.  She also sent me the link to Leslie's blog, The Seasoned Homemaker, that tells about her experience with color value.  Now this got me interested as to what I might be doing wrong in my fabric choices.  So I did a search on color value in quilting and found the following:

Ho Hum to Dazzling: How Color Value Affects Your Quilt - this article shows the same quilt, Storm at Sea, in three different black and white photos.  The first photo shows the wave movement due to the placement of the dark and medium fabrics.  The second photo is totally different and the waves are gone and the third photo the movement isn't as noticeable.  Who knew?  Probably all you experienced quilters out there, but I'm sort of a newbie as I've only been quilting for a couple years now with most of my learning by trial and error (mostly error). 

Another interesting article, Value and Value Tools from Karen Combs Studio.  Click here to read that article.   

You may not be totally confused by the issue of value, but I sure am.  Well, maybe not totally confused as I can distinguish between the light, medium, and dark values, but now I'm confused as to when and where to use them in a quilt.  I'll keep working on this and if you have any articles or thoughts on the subject, please share them.

Here is a picture of my EPP WIP that I converted to black and white.  You can certainly see which fabrics have the dark, medium, and light values.

Happy stitching.