Retreat - Saturday

A chilly start!

Interesting frost designs on someone's car.

An early start for people setting up stalls for the Lancefield Farmers Market, as the sun appears at the end of the street:

On this pre-breakfast walk, I noticed that the nursery had a sale on trees. And right near the front fence I noticed a tupelo, Nyssa sylvatica. I first admired this tree in the Ballarat Botanic Gardens seven years ago.

Later in the morning I went back and bought one:

then popped it in the bathroom of my room to keep it safe for the rest of the weekend.

Here's our workspace:

Empty because this was before breakfast. That's my Elna Lotus in the foreground, and you can see the hourglass blocks I worked on yesterday. My first challenge was working out how to make them so that the seams would nest when I sewed them together, but I came up with a method that worked. By lunchtime I had made quite a few more:

In the afternoon I finished the binding on a charity quilt that had been giving me a few hassles.

I think this is my 14th charity quilt quilted. I intended to completely machine-sew the binding, but I forgot that the new machine has a different width foot than my old Elna, so I had too much seam allowance. That meant the binding couldn't nicely cover the stitching on the front, so I ended up having to hand-sew the front of the binding, and it was hard going. The whole quilt suffered a bit:

 I'm hoping that waviness will relax with time.

Here's the back view so you can see the quilting:

I also laid out the rest of the Bloom blocks to finalise which fabrics will go where,

then I prepared a few of the applique parts for the next blocks. Photos of those can wait until the next Bloomer Party next Saturday.