Fall Retreat Report

Fall Retreat #2 was fantastic. My face and my stomach hurt from laughing. I had the best table mates. We all got so much done and had such a blast doing so.

I broke my iron handle and it kept flopping down and pinching my finger. If you click the picture to enlarge it, you can will see several things going on. See where I monkey rigged it to be able to continue to use it and it . I emptied a thread spool (and heaven forbid I would throw it away) and using a selvage strip, I tied it to the handle and kept on going. I will have Ernie look at it to see if he can figure out how to keep the handle up without the spool. If not, it's a good thing Jo told us about her new iron and I ordered myself one. I must have had a premonition.

I continued to work on My Ultimate Scrap Quilt like Julie's here. I have all my bird in the air blocks made with lots of leftovers to maybe make it a bit longer. I'll decide that when I need to.

The folded strips in front of the green basket are from our batik strip swap. We swapped batiks and background fabrics and I had 4 sets of each. I love strip swaps! And thanks to my friend Sue, I have 2 new strip books. One was a late birthday gift and the other I won in the Greedy Gift Game so lots of new projects to use them in.

My crumb basket is back there too. I made several more crumb blocks while showing a few of the gals how I make them. Then I set them aside and continued to work on my bird in the air blocks. My tablemate Pam worked on crumb blocks and was quite amazed at how her bin looked as if she had twice the amount of crumbs after using so many--she now knows the secret of multiplying crumbs and the fact that the quilters give you their scraps. Except the new to crumb quilters.......haha, I wonder how many came over to the crumby side.

I own a Sidewinder and seldom used it. A while back, I needed to wind a few bobbins for my Janome Gem machine before a class so I got it out and decided to just keep it in with my machine. It's my travel machine. I was too lazy to walk to where my bag was to get the thread stand out so I used my pinky as a thread holder. I thought I was pretty clever!

Thanks to everyone at retreat for another fabulous time. I miss you when I don't see you and I'm so happy we are able to spend time together. Now I am ready to stay home and work like a crazy woman. I have so many ideas that need to be written down before I forget and so much energy to do them all. Thanks for the inspirational weekend.