Eat, Quilt, Laugh

I had a wonderful time at our weekend mini-retreat. This is the one that takes place at a LQS which provides sewing space, dormitory-style bedrooms (with quilts on each bed as well as quilts on the walls), a kitchenette, and a running tab on sewing supplies.  We are known as the group "who cooks".  Other groups who book the weekends either go out to eat or get take-out food, but we divide up the meals and bring our own.  We think it's nicer that way, and the food is always delicious.  One of our group lives only about 10 minutes away from the shop and she has generously made us a fabulous dinner each time we've gone on retreat.  The rest of us pitch in for breakfast, lunch, and multitudes of snacks and drinks.

With lots of good food and laughter the weekend flies by.  Even so, I am always surprised at how much I can accomplish.

I had planned to make the 1800's doll quilt featured on the Moda Bakeshop website and had cut out all the fabric before the retreat.  This one is made from a charm pack and a half yard of solid fabric.  Somehow, even when I was cutting everything into 1 1/4" strips, it didn't occur to me how small all those nine patches were going to be.  These are tiny! 

They don't look so small in the picture above, but look at the picture below:  The 6 3/4 inch center block alone has 81 pieces!  This is one I would like to make again. It would be fun to use 2 1/2 inch strips to make a larger baby size quilt.

 

I was amazed at how well everything went together.  I think my machine piecing skills must have improved, because I know I couldn't have made anything like this even a year ago. 

I had a lot of fun putting this together and I love the result, but the some of the directions were a little sketchy.  Of course, it's only a matter of putting together a bunch of nine patch blocks, but I would have appreciated a little more idea of how many strips of each fabric I was going to be using.  As it is, I only used about half of the charm pack, but I think I may continue making nine patches with my already cut strips and put them in a different setting.  The doll quilt saga continues...

Two of us had ordered the new Gwen Marston book Liberated Quiltmaking II and another of us already had Collaborative Quilting, by Gwen Marston and Freddy Moran. After reading through both books we decided that we all liked the liberated style so much that we are to work on making and sharing tree blocks for our own liberated quilts.  It's going to be a lot of fun to work on this project together. Stay tuned for pictures.

*****************************************

Has anybody else noticed how weird bloglines has been behaving lately?  I won't get updated posts from some sites for days, then all of a sudden five or six posts from the previous week will appear all of a sudden.  Others seem to appear just the same as always.  I wonder what is going on.