Wednesday, June 06, 2012

2012 Morden Retreat

YEAH this year I finally convinced my sister to join me in Morden for the Aurora Quilters retreat during the Barnswallows Quilt Show weekend. 

It was too bad that I had an ungraceful uncontrolled meltdown at work the week before that put a horrible damper on this event.  BUT it was very good that those there did not know the circumstances and only knew that I just about had not attended.  Yes I would have missed it and I did get a lot of sewing accomplished that weekend - a good deal of it with the help of my sister and friends.  Thank you all.

Can you believe this - I did not really take retreat pictures!!!  I did photograph some quilt show items which will eventually be in my Webshots albums and yes I did get Sylvia to take a few pictures of my various projects that I worked on.  So here they are.
My first attempt at Sashiko and I must say I did pretty good.  To fill the space I did a varied echoing around with the Sashiko cotton thread.

These black & white with the red centre nine patch blocks were stitched up then cut apart and restitched as disappearing 9-patch blocks in March.  Then I snagged my sister and niece to "layout" the quilt top - I was going buggy and just gave up by myself.  So during the retreat I assembled the quilt top and added the narrow red inner border.  After this retreat I did start cutting the remaining 6.25 inch black & white blocks in half and stitching up the outer piano key like border.  One day I'll finish it off and repost again.

Then I found this awesome dragonfly fabric at Kathy's Quilt Shop in Carman along with the coordinating fabrics and used a pattern Sylvia had with her.  EXCEPT the pattern was basically 2.5 inch squares all sewn together - NADA I was not doing that.  I wanted something simpler using the lovely fabric designs for the centre blocks and then the coordinating fabrics I cut in strips and assembled together.  Now all I have to do is put it together in a pillow slip fashion - eliminating binding period.

Now this fabric with various images of typewriters and it's keys on a blotchy coloured background just caught my eye last year at Kathy's Quilt Shop in Carman and in my book "Quilt Your Stash" from Joan Ford's "Scrappy Therapy" program I sort of followed the "Table Stripes Runner" pattern.  I found the pastel orange-like batik for contrast to do a sort of colour wash look.  Then Tami suggested I should throw in some 4" blocks of the typewriter and the word blocks - SHEESH - it took me ages to set those blocks down on my flannel board.  I did like the idea but totally dreaded redoing anything, so I cut the blocks out and let them go with reconfiguring the layout, then I sewed it all together.  I LOVE IT!!!  THANK YOU ladies!!!

Yes I did enjoy my weekend even though there was that dark cloud hanging over me!

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