Retreat Fun

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well! I got to attend a very fun retreat with one of my quilt guilds this week. It was a daytime-only retreat, so I got to leave my stuff at the retreat center and go home in the evenings. The retreat committee did a wonderful job! The retreat was held at the new retreat center that I've mentioned before, Twisted Stitches in Superior, CO. There were 30 or so people at the retreat. They were all wonderful! When we got to the retreat, they gave us a cute little gift bag.

Retreat Gift Bag

There was also some chocolate in the gift bag, but that disappeared while I was there! We also had a chocolate fairy who would periodically make a circuit of the room with a basket of chocolate to keep us sewing strong. There was also a snack table that was overflowing with tasties in case we needed a larger burst of energy. Definitely, nobody went hungry! We also had a white elephant gift exchange with lots of fun gifts. I went away with a cute hand embroidery kit from Missouri Star.

White Elephant Embroidery Kit

The kit has thread, a hoop, a needle threader and needles, an instruction book and little wash-away peel-and-stick patterns that you put on your fabric stitch through. The motifs are the flowers and bugs you see on the tin. I've never used the peel-and-stick patterns before so this will be fun to try!

The big project I worked on at the retreat was the binding and backing for my Stars & Stripes Forever quilt top designed by Judy Martin (you can see that quilt top here). I like to make my quilt backs from scrap blocks and fabric left over from the front. For this quilt, I had a bunch of blocks left over from making my Star Spangled Banner quilt that I designed and donated to my mom's hospice years ago.

Star Spangled Banner

I was playing with the stitch and flip method when making this quilt. This method is usually used for sewing triangle corners on quilt blocks, but I was playing with using it to create chevrons. It was a lot of fun! Because of using this method, I ended up with a lot of half-square triangles that I saved in a bag for years. My quilt top is red, white and cream, but I decided to go ahead and use the red, white and blue leftovers in the back anyway. My binding will be blue, so the cream of the front won't really be seen at the same time as the white on the back. And it would be nice to get these blocks used up! I started by sewing the half-square triangles together into a bunch of pinwheel blocks. Then I put the blocks together into different configurations as the inspiration struck and added some borders to the new units. I just wanted to keep building things up so I could lay them out and sew them together into a backing. My backing needs to be about 105"x105", so I had a lot of space to fill! I got a bunch of units made at the retreat.

Stars & Stripes Forever - Backing Units

These units aren't displayed how they will end up in the backing, I just wanted to get a picture of all of them together to show what I have so far. The strip of pinwheels along the bottom is 105.25", so I can use that to gauge how far along I am. I have some smaller blocks that I will slip into the pieces that I build to put all of these together. I don't think it will take too long to finish this up.

While I was piecing the backing, I took the opportunity to make some progress on my Potato Chip leader/ender project. 

Potato Chip Leader/Enders - Retreat Progress

It's fun to see progress on this quilt while working on something else!

The last thing I worked on at the retreat was my Wild Women Don't Get the Blues quilt designed by Karen K. Stone. I had gotten tired of working on the quilt backing above, so on the final afternoon I put my sewing machine away and got out these blocks to do a little more hand embroidery.

Wild Women Don't Get the Blues

Hand embroidery is slow work, especially when you're also talking to the wonderful ladies around you, so I only got 1.5 blocks done. But progress is progress! Now I'm starting to think about whether I want to use the designs from the embroidery kit I got at the retreat on some of these blocks. I can't decide if I want to add organic designs or if I want to keep everything geometric on this quilt. I'll mull it over for a while. I'm sure I'll be happy no matter which way I go!

That's all that I did during the retreat, but I also did some crafting at home in the days before the retreat. Our guild is participating in the Quilts of Valor national block drive, so I made several blocks for that.

QOV Blocks

I'll try to get some more of these made this week before they are due at our guild meeting on Thursday.

Finally, I also made some more progress on my Rill Scarf designed by Miriam L. Felton. 

Rill Scarf

You can really see the ruffling that's developing on the edge of the scarf now!

Nancy