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Summer Quilt Retreat

Once again the Crazy Eights had another wonderful quilt retreat at the Sew Cozy Inn.



It is amazing how eight women can get together and everyone has such different tastes and interests. This time we started on Thursday instead of Friday.  I decided to work on Thursday morning and did not get to the retreat until that afternoon but we got plenty of sewing done!

It took me awhile to figure out what to take but I decided I would concentrate on finishing my LOVE quilt that I started at our last quilt retreat in March.   I did manage to a little more work on it so this is what it looked like before I left:



There were lots of cutting that of small squares that needed to be done.   Watching Fantastic Beasts helped and before I knew it all my little 2 1/2in squares were cut (all 68 of them)!  It made it much easier to work on the quilt at the retreat when all the pieces were cut out.


After it was pieced I had to think about how to quilt it.  That is where your quilting friends come in!  One of the gals had the perfect color of grey to use for the quilt and the other suggested just sewing straight lines vertically.  After it seemed like ages and ages of sewing straight lines it was finished!   I did have to make a run to the local quilt store to pick up some binding and of course some fat quarters ended up in bag as well!


Another quilting sister showed me how she made her labels and I was instantly in love!  I wish I had done this earlier to all of my quilts....especially the t-shirt ones I had done for my kids.



With the LOVE quilt finished on Friday night I had to decided what I would work on for the rest of the weekend.  I bought enough projects for a week (and fabric as well). I decided I would worked on mini quilts for my sewing room.  I used the Sew Happy Quilt pattern and fabric from my stash.  These went together pretty quickly.  The toughest one of course was the quilt block as there were lots of little pieces to cut up and put together!


I had these all put together and quilted by Saturday night.  If you look closely you can see some of the custom quilting I did on the sewing machine block.  I add some on the machine dial and the base.  You can still see some of the ink as I had to draw the pattern out first.  If it isn't stippling it needs to be drawn first!



Someone suggested that I use straight lines for the quilt block and follow the angles of the triangles.  I loved how it turned out!



To add more demension to the the spools of thread block I went back and forth with straight lines on the spool and I loved how that little bit of quilting made it look like a spool of thread.


You can see the quilting better from the back of the blocks.  I love these kind of quilt labels and if you add another corner piece to the opposite side you can hang the quilt by inserting down rods across the top!  So so clever!




There are so many talented people in this group and some with really good hearts who spent the weekend working on charity projects.  My good friend made 82 (yes 82) shields for Days for Girls. She has a heart of gold!

The details on the summer sampler is amazing...true talent there!



Aren't some of those projects just a work of art?


I have been home now for three days and my sewing machine has not been touched.  I probably will not get this much done again until I go on another retreat!  Maybe next week?  :)

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