Solo Retreat Weekend

It's been a great weekend of sewing. I had a retreat all by my BIG SELF! DH was gone and I spent the past two days in my studio sewing away, watching old movies and making some progress. I had planned to work on the Spring Fling Round Robin II, but I need batik fabric. I don't have a lot of batiks in my stash and wouldn't you know it -- I didn't have the color I needed.

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Here is a picture of the quilt top for my DS & DIL. This quilt has 110 (yes, I said 110) 8-inch blocks plus two borders. It is the largest quilt I have ever made. I've been working on it for a LOOOOOONNNNNNGG time. I grew bored with making the same block over and over and would always find some other little project to squeeze in. Well, the top is ready, the backing pieced, quilting thread selected and ready to be quilted. I would have quilted it over the weekend but I didn't have a batting large enough -- the largest I had was a queen size.

Here is a picture of the backing (all pieced and ready to go) draped over the longarm.

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The very first quilting retreat I ever went on was nearly 10 years ago. In January, we will celebrate our 10th anniversary of retreating together. There are only 7 of the original quilters left out of 17. We still have about 15 retreaters though. We decided the 7 charter members would exchange churn dash blocks. The center was to be made from a grey fabric to look like tin, which is a symbol for a 10-year anniversary.

The block on the left back in August at a retreat at the Compass Centre. It just looks so washed out and I really didn't like it at all. The grey, pink and purple seemed to just blend together. SEW, I made new blocks this morning (the block on the right). The center looks like grey cat hair with the churn dash being a lime green and the other portion black with brightly colored paw prints. I still have to sign my name.

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A few posts back, I was soliciting ideas for organizing my fabric. When going thru all my fabric, I found these Christmas redwork blocks done on my Janome 10000 a few years back. I had forgotten all about making them -- what a pleasant surprise. They are stitched on a white fabric with snowflake motifs. I decided to put them together. I just went to the Christmas drawer (see, I got somewhat organized --LOL!), and found some fabrics that I thought would look good with the blocks.

I put a red "flipper" (my own personal quilting term) around each block before sashing with the green stripe and red polka dot cornerstones. I then put a red "stop border" around the blocks before adding the final border. I thought the border fabric that looks like old-fashion Christmas trees with toys was a good compliment to the red and green fabrics. It is ready to be quilted. I plan to use the red polka dot as the binding. Here are some pictures of the finished top.