Retreat Results

Nothing like 3 days of intensive quilting to finally make some progress. I spent a long weekend at a rural retreat center close to Princeton IL with about 30 other quilt buddies from the guild. I brought more than I knew I had time to work on, but worked on my priority projects and got them to where they needed to be.

This is the first one to show off, a quilt top for my newest grand-nephew Brady. The pattern is from a magazine clipping from Quilter's Newsletter, October 2005 that wanted me to use templates for the fabric cutting.The designer is Kelora Lee Goethe and she called her original quilt Stars from the North and the South. Her design finished with a border of background color and applique flowers sprinkled around. With 10 1/2" blocks, it took some math and trial and error to get the star points to work out using an easier flying geese piecing technique. The color fabrics are the same as the ones I used for Brady's big brother's quilt, but I changed out the background for a gray and cream piece. I also left out the final border of flowers.

I don't know where that pink glow in the center is coming from. Maybe a flashback? In real life it doesn't have that pink glow.

I have a long weekend ahead of me. DD Amanda is getting through three hard finals today, and will have more on Tuesday after Memorial Day. Those won't be as intense, but she'll still stress. But I won't so much with her physics, pre-calc and AP history behind her. So I plan to sew again.

On my to-do list: 2 project bags to sew to donate to the guild quilt show boutique; layer Brady's quilt and plan the quilting design; quilt a crazy cat quilt and bind it, and embroider one more cat block (which will mean I'd have 4 of 9 done, or 5 of 9 done?). Somewhere in there will be movies and DVDs to watch. I will also do a sample sandwich of batiks with some fusibles and practice thread painting in preparing my mind for work on Mitchell's cat.

Marilyn