Retreat 2015

Last weekend I attended the annual Boston MQG retreat up in Kennebunkport, ME. This was my fourth time attending retreat and I can honestly say I always have an amazing time with the wonderful ladies of our guild. I think we have a pretty awesome guild with a wide range of skills and aesthetics, which is always so inspiring.

My first order of business was finishing up my Prism Dust quilt top. I arrived with 33 out of the 36 blocks made. I finished the three blocks and got to work on piecing the top together. Because these blocks were paper pieced, I kept the paper on, but it becomes very heavy as you're piecing along. The benefit of keeping the paper on while piecing everything together is that you have less distortion because of all the bias and accuracy is improved.

Piecing the top took a lot more time than I thought it would. All together, I've definitely spent over 100 hours piecing this top, which I began last summer. Given my schedule, I've spent a few hours here and there on this quilt when I had the time.

My other finish for the weekend was this zippered pouch for our zipit challenge. ZipIt kindly provided a 14" navy zipper for us all to make a zippered pouch. I've wanted to use these cotton and steel arrows for the bottom of a bag for some time. I thought this was the perfect opportunity. I freehanded a flying goose pattern on some paper to paper piece for the top part and offset it. I was really happy with the result and blown away that I actually won the challenge. I can honestly say I wasn't expecting to win because there were so many awesome pouches. We have some seriously talented quilters in our guild, so I was honored to win.

I did work on a few other projects here and there that I didn't finish. One was a leaders and enders project with equilateral triangles. One was a quilt that I can't speak of. Not because it's secret, but because the pattern was such a PITA and poorly written that I had to put it aside I was so frustrated. I think I'm going to figure out how to paper piece the pattern instead. I don't have pictures of those yet, but stay tuned!

Getting Ready to Retreat!

Our annual BMQG retreat is upon us and I've been very busy getting ready for it. With my longarm out for service for 14 LONG weeks and my domestic in for regular maintenance and to repair the broken handle and thread holder for the past four weeks, I've been spending most of my time cutting. Throw in the craziness of working full time and going to grad school full time, and I'm going through some serious sewing withdrawal. Four days of sewing sounds like pure bliss right now.

One of my big projects will be to make a quilt using this bundle of fabrics. I'm using a dozen different Liberty of London prints with a coordinating Textured Solids fabric from Andover and a neutral chambray from Robert Kauffman for the background. Let's just say this quilt will be full of different textures. If all goes according to plan, I hope to enter this quilt at QuiltCon and possibly a few other shows with modern quilting categories.

I'm also hoping to work on a bunch of WIPs including my Meadow quilt, which I started at the Philly SewDown. I have four of the 20 blocks complete. Below are the first three blocks. I finished cutting the remaining 16 blocks last week, so I might be able to finish this one, depending on how much time I spend sewing vs. talking.

I'll bring a few other WIP's with me to work on, but I don't know if I'll get to them or not. Maybe I'll get to my quilted tote, also a WIP from SewDown.

And if that's not enough, I brought a few smaller projects to make some zippered pouches and such for some upcoming birthdays and baby showers. Let's just say I'm going to be busy. But that means I'll actually have something to show since I've been so quiet lately.

Linking up to WIP Wednesday at Freshly Pieced. 

Back from Retreat

I'm back from the annual BMQG Retreat up in Kennebunk Maine. I had a great time and got a TON of stuff done.  I'll share some of the projects I worked on or finished (that I can talk about) this week.

On the way up we stopped at three quilt stores and did a little shopping.  I was very reserved on my purchases and only bought a few things.  (My purchase on the way back and Mardens, a discount fabric store, is another story.)

Here we are in our work room.  There were 14 of us and we each had our own table for our machine.  There were lots of lights for us to use and a cutting station.  There were two ironing boards and irons, and we set up a few additional ironing stations for everyone to use.  We also had three design walls where were often occupied with many great quilts in progress.

Lots of folks brought food.  Emily brought homemade fig newtons, I brought raspberry goat cheese brownies, chips, fruit, cookies, crackers, etc. also made an appearance. 

Aimee gave a demo on how to use the twister ruler to make pinwheel quilts.

After, KK and I walked a nearby beach that I vacationed at for 15 years growing up.  It was windy but beautiful out.  I actually turned the AC on in my car for the first time this year.  I don't think I've ever had the AC on in the middle of March up here in New England.  Crazy!

All in all, I had a great time.  It was great spending time with the members of the guild and getting to know them more. I got a lot accomplished quilting wise too, an added bonus.