Quilt Con Retreat

According to my calendar, I should be at Quilt Con right now!!

Michael had a conference in Nashville this week, and I needed to attend to help with photography and recording.

We had planned to come back on Friday, and then I was leaving EARLY Saturday morning to drive 6 hours to Raleigh for Quilt Con.

I figured I could spend a few hours on Saturday, return Sunday morning for a few more hours, and then drive home that afternoon.

But going into this week, I realized I was already tired and would return completely EXHAUSTED… not a good idea…

ESPECIALLY since it is still tax season!!

SO, I decided to stay home this weekend and spend a lot of time in my studio.

No, I won’t get much CPA work done, but it will be relaxing, and I will arrive on Monday morning refreshed and ready to work.

It has been a hard decision, but I remember how exhaustion affected my creativity last year, and I do NOT want to repeat that scenario!!

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Stay tuned for stories from my Q-C Retreat!!!

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A scrappy Retreat

Tomorrow I leave for 5 days at my quilt guild retreat.

Our retreats are SO much fun and I am truly excited about it. We meet in one large room with the cafeteria on the floor beneath us. We sleep in rooms a few hundred yards away.

The schedule is simple…..

Sleep…..Quilt…..Eat……Quilt…..Eat…..

Quilt….Eat…..Quilt…………REPEAT!!

It doesn’t get much better than that!!

At this point, I am normally struggling to figure out what to take with me to work on, but not this year.

That is because I am going TOTALLY SCRAPPY!!

Last weekend I told you about the new quilt that I have designed to use up my 2-inch squares…..

A NEW quilt in the midst of the madness!

So, I spent bit of time cutting white squares to add to the scraps….

….and now it is boxed up and ready to go…..

Then there is the scrap quilt that I started several retreats ago. I had lost interest in it but decided to throw the blocks up on the wall anyway…..

….and was pleasantly surprised how the reds pop out. Then I started thinking about ways that I could quilt it to FURTHER emphasize those red strips.

SO….. it is also being added to the retreat bag…..

Then there is a quilt that I started at another retreat to use up my marbled fabrics from MANY years ago. ….

I’m still uncertain about what the layout will be but I hope to continue making strips to play with!!

FINALLY, a number of years ago I purchased all of the hand-dyes from a friend who was going out of business. She also threw in all of the off-cuts that came from the trimming process…..

LOTS of off-cuts!!

I have thought about these for a while, wondering what I could use them for. Then I had an epiphany…..

STRIP BLOCKS!!!

Okay…I will throw it in as well.

Do you think that I am taking enough???

PLUS, I want to leave some time for sitting in my favorite spot and THINKING!!

This Spring retreat is a perfect time for planning what I want the summer to look like!

Come back this week for progress updates!!

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One of my favorite things about quilting is motivating others and helping them in their quilting journey. As part of this endeavor, I LOVE to present programs and workshops to groups and guilds around the world. All of my programs work well with Zoom meetings, and I would love to speak to your group.

You can find out more at this link…..

MY retreat fun

Yesterday I showed you what everybody else was doing at the retreat.

Now it is MY turn!!!

I started out by working on the Monarch Challenge and left it at this point…..

There is a lot more to do on this piece and I will start giving you a “blow-by-blow” description of the process this next week.

The next project was the “Winnie The Pooh” baby quilt which I have shown you over the past week…..

Next, I finished a project that my friend Claire had started back in 2020. She had pieced all of the blocks and we had cut all of the sashings and borders so it was fast work to finish the piecing…..

It has been basted and given to Mary who has just bought a sit-down long arm. It will be a cheerful piece for her to practice on and then it will be donated to our guild charity work.

I found a couple of hours to spend at the lake, and yes, I laid down and took a nap in the swing…..

I had a bit of time left on the last evening so it was time to start another project.

Just before I left for the retreat, one of my clients told me that she was dropping off a “bag of goodies” for me. In it, I found these green and orange fabrics…..

I had watched a YouTube tutorial about making this block…..

….and it didn’t take long to graph it out…..

…..start cutting……

(I promise that these are orange…..they just photographed as pink!!)

I started by making the 4″ by 8″ flying geese blocks, but since there was so much waste fabric, I sewed a second line……

…..and ended up with 48 “free” 1/2-square triangles……

As the final morning of the retreat wound down, I finished piecing the 6 blocks……

….but it obviously needs some more planning to finish. It will make a bright and cheery charity quilt.

AND…..before I was ready, it was time to pack up and head home again……

I am already looking forward to the next retreat in September!!!

Retreat Recap…..

This time last week I was returning from my week-long guild retreat. It was a fun time of relaxing, sewing, and fun!!

My friend and roommate, Linda, gave me this gift when we were unpacking…..

It fits my foot pedal perfectly and kept it from slipping all over the floor…..

As ou r week progressed, various projects were finished including this top from Betsy…..

Vicki was working on this great pattern……

….and I loved her excellent organization system…..

Lisa was working on this beauty……

…..and Mary was finishing up this top…..

Rosie was making a wonderful quilt using these blocks…..

…..while Sue was making strip pieced blocks…..

She IS the queen of this technique!!!

Judy was piecing this bright beauty….

Linda started on a one-block wonder, getting some help from Rachel in the initial cutting process……

Isn’t it looking great…..

During the week there was a lot of sewing….

….and a little bit of ripping……

….and a whole lot of camaraderie…..

If you ever get the opportunity to attend a retreat…….. GO and ENJOY!!!!

Retreat….try it!!

These past two weeks were a creative retreat for me and it has been such an encouraging time!!

Michael was planning to return to Mozambique for almost two weeks and, since I wasn’t going along, I planned 13 days of creative FUN while he was away. BUT, the new COVID variant meant that countries were closing down and we didn’t feel comfortable sending him to Africa, not knowing if he was going to be able to get back home easily.

So, our plans changed.

I would love to say that we both smiled and said “it’s okay” but we were both SO disappointed and actually grieved on the day that the tickets were canceled.

On the morning that he was to head for the airport, we unpacked his carefully packed duffel and started making plans for how we were going to make the most of our time.

The first decision is that we would not have any meals that required more than 20 minutes of prep time…..PERIOD!!

Secondly, Michael was going to spend time thinking about the book that he was researching and also looking for new outlets for his amazing creative writing skills.

Thirdly, I was going to keep a schedule closer to my “alone-time” schedule….ie….no gym time, later nights, working in my studio at night rather than just watching TV.

And it worked!!!

The first morning I went out to walk and hit a podcast talking about efficiency versus effectiveness. That was all it took to start the ideas pouring into my mind. I kept stopping to send myself emails and finally realized that I wasn’t getting ANY aerobic exercise so started using SIRI to send them for me.

When I got home, I spent some time planning projects and “brain-dumping” all of my new ideas.

Then it was up to the studio!!

Over the next weeks, I will show the projects that I accomplished during this time, and over the next year, you will see some of the ideas that I now have in mind for my website and for the blog.

Yesterday it ended…..

I started back to working in my office and doing all of the normal things that we do in our household.

And that is okay!!

But, I wonder…..

Did I really need to wait until I had a 13-day period free before I could feel creative?

What would happen if I planned a 5-day creative retreat every few months?

Or maybe just a 2-day weekend retreat every two months?

I have a lot of flexibility in my work schedule and maybe I could organize those times with little or no CPA work and LOTS and LOTS of creative time.

Maybe this has more to do with mindset than it does with time….

I really felt empowered during these 13 days. But what was different????

It was simply the mindset that I WAS creative and that I HAD TIME to be creative.

So, the question is simple…..

Tag: Retreat