Retreat

Our annual fall retreat from our group at church was this week end. We go to a YMCA camp about an hour from home. Here are pictures from our first retreat. I only took a few  pictures on Friday and that was it. I guess I was too busy unsewing patches.

I made 8 place mat fronts from this pattern. It is a nice easy pattern and I could have finished all 8 place mats in 2 1/2 hours, more or less but at one point I stopped reading the directions and thought I missed a step. It is a stack, cut, shuffle and sew pattern and I missed a shuffle after the vertical cuts; I didn't shuffle the stack on the right. I had to take out 10 vertical seams and shuffle the right side stack. That should have been 8 seams, right? It would have been but  I had mixed up 2 of the narrow strips and redid them. It would have been OK to leave the right side stack unshuffled but after I found the mistake I knew it would bother me. It didn't take that long to fix.  As it turns out I did not miss a shuffle I had it right according to the pattern. I never learn; I know that before ripping out seams I should make sure that it is indeed wrong. However designer of the pattern says that you will probably come up with many more versions beside the 4 she includes. So mine is just another version.

Here is one set of fronts, the other set is the same.

I also finished up a few blocks from our BOM demos and I plan to use them in small projects. They are from different years and were different sizes and in differnt stages of being finished as they were to shows steps in making the blocks.

Everyone worked on their own projects and also some of our group block or quilt projects for our "caring quilts" to go in our closet to give away. There were a lot of finished projects and lots of progress on the almost finished.

Betty gave us a tutorial on a mini little twister project. The little twisters were 2 or 2 1/2 inches finished; they are really too cute.

It was another fun week end and we would all like to do it again in the spring or early part of the year but we tried that twice and it never worked. When you live in the "lake effect" snow belt you don't know if you are going to be able to drive an hour away from home especially to an area right on the lake. We are thinking a Friday night and Saturday retreat at the church might be a good idea for January or February. We'll see. Our church always has a lot going on and it isn't always easy to fit in another event for people to plan around.