Retreat - Sunday

Beautiful elms shade the grounds of the retreat venue:

I think it is a while since anyone had a barbecue:

After lots of laughter and interesting conversations and lovely meals and even more sewing it was time to pack up everything and head home. My main achievement for the weekend was making and attaching the 5th border on my Rajah Revisited:

The quilt has grown a little since the last time I posted my progress 4 months ago.

Group photo before we all departed:

I got home at about 5:30, where a couple of dogs were overjoyed to see me again. And I was happy to be home, too.

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.

Retreat - Friday

My room for this weekend's retreat:

Just a fairly plain motel room, brightened up by my Carolina Chain quilt. The retreat actually started this morning, but I work on Friday morning so didn't get here until later in the afternoon.

Notice my computer optimistically plugged in. The "free wifi" didn't work in my room most of the time, and my phone had no signal for most of the weekend. "Emergency calls only" or sometimes, "No SMS connection". I was in a communications black hole! So much for my plans to blog as the weekend progressed. This and the following posts are being written after my return home.

I had asked for vegetarian meals. Here's tonight's dinner:

Definitely lots of vegetable matter! Roast veges, and salad. (Subsequent meals were more balanced, fortunately.)

I made a start on one of the projects I brought with me, photos tomorrow.

Stay At Home Retreat

This weekend was my quilt guild's annual "stay at home" retreat. I had trouble deciding what to take with me to work on, as the main thing I need to do is my Christmas challenge piece for this group, and that has to remain secret.

In the end I took three things to do, and got them all done.

1. Binding and label added to the charity quilt with polar fleece backing that I quilted a week ago:

2. Backing made for my "Easy Street" quilt:

That's three lengths of fabric sewn together to make backing for this nearly 2.5m square quilt. Easy Street was the Bonnie Hunter mystery in 2012. Mine was last seen here in July 2016, when I was adding borders. Now I have the top, the batting, and the back ready. How long until I get it basted, I wonder?

3. Appliquéing the last three-and-a-half of these things:

That's the fourth side done for this round of Rajah Revisited. It has been a long time coming. I made the first side in March, finished the second side in June, and have taken another four months to get to this point. Here's how it all looks so far on the design board at home:

The top and bottom borders aren't attached yet, because see those bare corners? They are now meant to get something like this added:

I'm considering my options.

I was told beforehand that you should take far more than you can achieve to the retreat. I failed in that respect, but I'm glad that I did finish what I took with me!

Retreat

This weekend has been the Ballaarat Quilters' "Stay at Home" retreat. "Stay at Home" because it's not a sleep-over retreat, just all-day sewing sessions. This year there were no classes; the focus was completing items for our upcoming quilt show. I missed Saturday morning because of the trip to Mount Macedon, but yesterday afternoon I attended and did some hand stitching. Today I brought along my machine and my "What's in the Box" mystery quilt, and made and attached the binding:

I'm trying a new (to me) binding technique. I sewed ricrac braid down first, and once the binding is complete the ricrac will peep out from behind it.

Retreat Day Two

On the second day of the retreat, I learnt that sewing rows of little apple cores together is a bigger pain than sewing individual apple cores together.

It was fun sitting and sewing amongst friends:

A corner of one of the two rooms full of sewing machines - taken during the lunch break. You can see my little Elna on the back table.

I was exhausted, though, and didn't get as much sewing done as I had hoped:

Back home, pinned to my design wall. Eight rows joined (on the left) and five rows remaining on the right.

Apple Core Workshop

This weekend Ballaarat Quilters have a "stay at home" retreat. There are activities during the day, but the venue is in Ballarat so everyone can go home to sleep.

Today I attended an all-day workshop on apple cores. There are four different sizes in the template set we used, and I was the only person who chose to make the smallest size. It was a challenging choice; sewing the tiny curves together was far from easy!

I want this year to be more about finishing projects than starting new ones, so I'm making a small table runner. I stitched my apple cores into sets of 7, and by the end of the workshop I had 13 sets. Then came the fun of trying to arrange them so that a fabric wasn't beside itself, or clumped in one section:

Tomorrow the retreat continues, and I will probably play with this arrangement a bit before sewing the rows together. My plan is to have the whole thing assembled by the end of the weekend.