Retreat

Six of us from the quilt group at church went to our annual retreat at a YMCA camp in NW Pa. We met there on Friday and got settled in our rooms in a nice lodge just across the lawn from our work area. We had a lovely big room to work in,with big windows on 3 sides and enough space for triple the number of people who attended.

 This was the view from the windows at the end of the room.

Most of our meals are in the dining hall right across from our sewing/quilting room.
We have our meals with whoever is camping there that week end. It has usually been the Father/Daughter week end for the the Y Indian Guides and it was again this year. It is nice to just walk across the hall and have our meals without having to cook or go out somewhere. The food is not gourmet but it is adequate and we have no complaints. Friday there is no dinner served so we bring something for a pot luck meal.

Everyone was productive. Betty, Dorine and Cathy are show their with their projects below each of them.




























Betty and Cathy each worked pretty steadily on one project, a double 4 patch for Betty and a Judy Neidemier paper piece project for Cathy. Dorine had 4 projects,  2 that were finishes and 2 that she started. This is a T shirt quilt that she started Saturday from her fathers Bald Eagle T shirts. Her Dad passed away this past year and she is making this for her mother.

Elaine, on the left, had more than one project too. She made a baby quilt from a kit and applied binding to another quilt and made these "Take 4" batik placemats.
Kim worked on one project all weekend. She had a lot more blocks in more colors that she finished after I put my camera away.
































I layered up my Mary Ellen Hopkins Basement Diva challenge; it was great to have 4 tables pushed together to work on. I made "Take 4" placemats too; I didn't finish them at the retreat but I did finish them today. Somehow, I managed to make one of them 1/2 inch wider even though I trimmed them all very carefully. I know how I did it. I decided they all needed to be just a bit smaller and I was interrupted after the first one and I had not written down the measurement. So..... when I got back to to trimming, I just went ahead and cut without checking.

There is no photo of me but if you look closely I am reflected in the window behind Betty while shooting her photo.

I'm Back

It has been a long time since my last post. I have been busy finishing up some things and busy with things other than quilting; none of it was worth posting.

I altered and shortened a bridesmaid  dress and I have a brand new appreciation for what goes into the construction of a strapless dress after deconstructing the zipper installation and reinstalling the zipper after taking in the seam. Then there were four layers of skirt. It is done....... and that sound you hear is a deep sigh of relief. This really taxed my skills.

Our quilt group at church usually has a weekend retreat in the fall at a Y camp on Lake Erie. This year our plans fell through and we decided to have two days of sewing at the church instead. There were 9 of us on Friday for some sewing before a pot luck supper and 2 hours of sewing after we ate.

A great thing about this week end was having some young people with us. One of the girls from summer Quilt Camp joined us both days  and Saturday another girl from quilt Camp and her mother joined us, along with a granddaughter and her friend of one of our group. One of our members came with her two daughters on Saturday for the day.
Sharon started this quilt after quilt camp last summer using the  pattern we used for QC. The one she made this summer and this one are for her two grandmothers; she worked on it all weekend. On the right is another of our Quilt Campers she and her mother came Saturday afternoon to make "made fabric" blocks for an  quilt that everyone at Quilt Camp contributed to and which will be auctioned at a fundraiser the youth group will have in the spring.

Emily is working on really colorful  quilt. She has not been old enough for Quilt Camp but she has been sewing at home with her mother (middle photo). On the right. you can see all the shreds that have been trimmed away as her locks were squared up. She couldn't find bright enough fabric so she used some bright bandannas along with black and white dotted fabric. Good choice!

Here are all the ladies (young and old older) working on their made fabric squares.


Betty makes a lot of quilts using scraps, some of them very small as in this pine tree quilt and others are strip pieced using large scraps and in the "many trips" flimsy. Some of her quilts she quilts by hand and you can see the quilting in the close up.  she also make a  lot of quilts with a planned fabric palette show in the lower right corner.





Here is most of the group; Dorine couldn't make it Saturday and Kim had to take one of her girls to a birthday party. I am on the other side of the camera.  The six in the middle are the young people OH WAIT! That is Debbie in the red shirt in the center; she is not one of the girls but she is young at heart.


We had a good week end and though we missed the sunsets over Lake Erie it was more than made up for by having the girls join us. We hope they will make it a habit the second Saturday of the month.

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.



Retreat

This weekend our small quilting group at church had a retreat at Camp Fitch, a YMCA camp in Pennsylvania. The 7 of us arrived Friday around dinner time. After we brought  in all our quilting stuff we had a potluck supper and spent a short time visiting and then we got busy. Everyone brought their own projects to work  on and some of us accomplished A LOT, others (me) not so much. I couldn't decide what I wanted to bring after finding that my quilt top that I wanted to layer up and machine quilt was too big for the backing I had pieced. I will work something out but it was not something I wanted to deal with this week end. I ended up bringing my Q Snap frame and my BIG UFO to hand quilt, along with some smaller projects to work on.

This is the corner where I was working. Through the windows behind my quilt frame you can see the lodge where we slept. We had very nice accommodations but spent very little  time there except to sleep. The room where we sewed and spent most of our time was right across the hall from the dining hall. We were served 3 meals on Saturday and Sunday breakfast. We shared meal times with the  father and son Indian Guides from various YMCAs. The food was plain, wholesome and served family style or buffet and one person from each table picked up family style serving dishes for their own table and everyone cleaned up their own table afterward. It was all done very efficiently. It was great not to have to cook or worry about what or where we were going to eat.

Our  sewing area was spacious with good lighting and great scenery. This photo was taken from about the center of the room lengthwise. We could have as many tables as we needed and they were large and sturdy.



Debbie Was working on a Ribbon Star quilt, a variation of the Friendship star. she got all of her HSTs done and finished some of the blocks.

Here is Debbie standing on the table in order to be far enough away to get a good  shot of Kim's quilt which is on the floor below.  

Above is Kim working on the border and the sleeve of another quilt that she was finishing up. She was very industrious, putting the finishing touches on 2 large quilts, started and finished 2 table toppers, embellished a sweatshirt and started a HST quilt from 2 charm packs.





Diane is a new quilter and was given a lovely little Featherweight in wonderful almost like brand new condition by a cousin. 

Darlene pieced a back for a signature wedding quilt and it was a very big project. By the end of our retreat she had the quilt layered up and pin basted.

Betty machine quilted this Bonnie Hunter mystery quilt and she got the quilting finished and the binding on by the end of the day.Betty had a slight disaster mishap she put a 3 - 4 inch gash in her border through all 3 layers. Wonder Under came to the rescue and she is going to put a label over it on the back and an applique something on the front. It will be a design decision.

Dorine finished quiting 2 baby quilts and here she is looking over her Jellyroll strips and Eleanor Burns' Whirligig pattern. She finished all the components and had 2 finished blocks  by the time she was ready to pack everything up and head for home. 

You can see pictures of our 2010 retreat here with some shots of the lake. I took a picture of the lake this year but it was overcast and gray and the sky and lake blended in a mass of gray.
It was a fun weekend and we are going to do it again in March and then again in September 2012.