Every February since 2009 I've flown to Phoenix for a few days to spend a long weekend with 31 of my quilty friends. This year I went a day earlier than before (as did many retreat attendees) and we spent that extra time shopping for goodies. I went to SAS for the first time and also a shop called Family Needlework where I found a great display of silk ribbons. I wanted to get one of everything, but restrained myself.
Above is a picture of my Celtic Solstice quilt, which finally received its borders. I left it with Ami to quilt on her long arm. I chose not to put the final (plain) green border on mine. It was plenty big enough for me as it was. I will most likely bind it with the same dark browns that I used for the inner border. I understand that this former mystery will soon be a published pattern in one of Bonnie Hunter's books coming out later this year.
And here is the layout we decided on for Hot Paisley Mess. Ami offered to help me arrange the blocks (how could I pass that up?!) and agreed that it looked good with the black and white block in the center. She then noticed that I had 4 blocks that had a lot of teal/aqua in them and we pulled those toward the center. We then finished the center with 4 of the lightest blocks. It looks like it's glowing now! While in AZ I did manage to sew most of it together, I just have one long seam now to join the 2 parts, and then I can work out a border. I used roughly 70 of the 100+ paisleys from my collection, and am entertaining the idea of adding a piano key border and trying to incorporate most if not all of the paisleys into that. We shall see. Pattern is
Jared Takes a Wife, a freebie from BH.
During the retreat, we also worked on a mystery quilt. It turned out to be a
Double Irish Chain pattern, and was hosted by Linda P. I fussy cut some blocks from a print, but if you look closely you'll see that the words run every which direction and not always the same side "up" as the graphic closest to the words. This caused some in the room to have small fits as they tried to "fix" the orientation, LOL. Now I think they understand why I had my blocks set up going all directions to begin with. I will get back to this soon to finish the borders, as I have it all cut out, I just didn't have time during retreat with all the shopping, talking and having to get CS done first so I could hand it off to Ami.
I also made some little hostess gifts this year for Carolyn, Cathy, Ellen, Kim, Denise, Laura, Sharon and Pat. They finished at about 1" across, and are hand embroidered. They can be used as scissor fobs or just for decoration.
