Quilt Retreat
Last weekend, the Gallatin Quilt Guild hosted its fourth annual quilt retreat. I look forward to the retreat all year long. It is always such fun. I had a great time visiting with old friends and getting to know new people. I also made significant progress on a couple of projects.
We arrived at the lodge on Thursday afternoon. After setting up my space and catching up with friends, I assembled the top of the final baby quilt. I had all of the blocks ready to go before I arrived, so I just had to sew them together.
On Friday, I started working on this year's retreat quilt. Every year, a few of us choose a pattern to work on together. This year, the pattern is Serendipity by Missouri Star Quilt Company. It can be found in Block volume 1 issue 5.
I wanted to be able to focus on sewing while I was at the retreat, so I did all of my cutting and marking ahead of time. Since everything was ready to go, I was able to dedicate Friday to sewing strips together.
Saturday, I continued the strip sewing. When that was finished, I sub-cut the strips into rail fence units. Here are all 180 of my rail fence units ready for the next stage. The next step is to use the grey squares to snowball opposite corners on each rail fence unit.
Sunday, I decided to take it easy and just work on a bit of hand stitching until it was time to depart. It was nice to spend a little bit of time away from the machine after so much power sewing the previous three days. I even learned a new method of knotting my thread at the beginning and end for binding. I'm still getting the hang of it, but I think I may like this method better than the way I was doing it before.
As always, the weekend went too fast, but I am so grateful to have the memories. Now I can start looking forward to next year. After all, it's only 358 days away.