retreat wrap up #1

What fun this past weekend and a great way to spend your birthday if you can! Good times, good company and good food since it was catered for us by Nessa who also owns the quilt shop and the space where we met. Since one of the reasons we were meeting was to do the reveal on our rows, I will show you those first.

This is mine---love those 30's repros---I made the spool row

This is Joy's sections---she did the grandmother's flower garden section and continues to work on a full sized version of it at the retreat. (I made the fan row) The last row is special as Mary Frances used some signature blocks the Belles had made some years back but added a strip on the top and bottom of the original rail fence section. Mary Frances has a friendship quilt that is also signed so she chose to donate these to Joy, our group's original leader.

Mary Frances with her house blocks--I did the 2nd row from the top--my blocks again to the left

Betsy with her Patriotic rows--the three to the right were already joined--I made the row closest to Betsy

Debora with her Halloween Row--I did the bats with the Boo block on this one. She only needs to add one more row to complete the quilt.

And in case you are wondering, I will be doing it again the next round as we decided to allow 6 weeks between rounds. Joy twisted my arm enough. Both people I had confessed this (my mom and Cher) said "I knew you would!" The longer time between rounds will only work if I do not put it off for 5 weeks prior. Blame will be strictly mine if I do, LOL. 7 of us will be participating.

A little story here from Joy. She had made this "Quiltmaker's Gift" quilt for donation to Wrap Them In Love. I think that the pattern may have come from Connecting Threads--either with the fabric purchase or as a free pdf pattern. She liked the star in the 2nd row called "Compassionate Star" and it is really clever how it goes together-- half square triangle units were done with the blue and you do a shorter diagonal flip corner thing over it and it is assembled like a friendship star would be.

Anyway, she made 12 of these stars resized for MY row. THEN she read the directions where I had listed the colors I would like in my quilt and I had said "no browns please" The dark is actually a navy floral print and the brown in question was a tan--not totally 30's vintage but very cute. Not wanting the blocks to go to waste she assembled them into another top for the kids. We will probably pin these two tomorrow at the quilt meeting. Oh, the girls named this one "When All Else Fails, Read the Directions" She ended up making the 9 inch friendship stars that are shown in my row picture.

I'll share a few more pictures of our "show and tell" and what I managed to get done at the retreat in another post. You know how tempermental uploading can be at times. Sequentially, it will probably be off a bit.