Wednesday, February 08, 2012

My Needlepoint Hearts: the Power of Imagination

Today has been a very busy day on Queendom Website for my annual Needlepoint Hearts Sale started in the very early a.m.

This year I have 8 new hearts. I had planned to have 5, but then at Christmastime I played a game with my general classroom at Shining Needle Society. I gave them a short description of each of the 5 hearts

Heart #1 The dominant color is charcoal. This heart has beads
Heart #2 The dominant color is rust.
Heart #3 The dominant color is periwinkle. This heart has beads.
Heart #4 The dominant color is periwinkle. This heart has pearls
Heart #5 The dominant color is pink. This heart is smaller than the others.

Based on these descriptions I asked the class to conjure up what they thought each heart might look like and vote for one.
Obviously there weren't enough hints for anyone to guess accurately (although a few people came close). The idea wasn't to guess what the heart did look like but to use the hints to help imagine a heart they would like.

I promised to post a photo of the heart with the most votes on my website on Christmas morning.
#4 heart was the one they chose. It is called Periwinkle Roses and Pearls Heart and it has Bullion Roses, Ribbon Roses, some typical needlepoint patterns and a sprinkling of pearl. It's a very Girlie Girl heart which seems to me appropriate for Valentine's Day.

Heart #1 was the second choice, mainly because everybody wondered how I would combine charcoal with a heart motif.
As people know now, I took the bodice of my Elizabeth 1 needlepoint portrait and made a heart so that my students could practice several of the techniques before they stitch them 'for real' on their portraits.

Heart #5 which is really the subject of this post received many votes from people who like pink; they also said they liked the idea of a small heart and imagined it must have pink roses and pearls. One person even said that she would love a series of small hearts, quick to stitch, with pink roses and pearls.

In actuality, Heart #5 is rather geometric, a little scissors case with tiny scissors on its backside, in short nothing like the hearts my classroom members conjured up, but I loved their ideas.

I immediately started three small hearts, smaller than my normal hearts, and graduated in size. The motifs were of course pink roses with a sprinkling of pearls.

And that's why I planned 5 hearts for my yearly sale but actually have 8 hearts in the sale.

It wasn't important whether my classroom guessed what my hearts looked like; much much more important the power of their imaginations, even if the end results of their conjurings were nothing like the actual heart #5.

I have to say thank you to my general classroom at SNS for the ideas. In fact, I bundled the three hearts and made them a special price for my classroom as a small thank you.

The needlepoint hearts in my annual hearts sale are now posted on Queendom Website,
www.GayAnnRogers.com.
They will be there through Valentine's Day.

Gay Ann

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