Final Report From Retreat

I am approaching the expiration date on the content of today's post. Yes, this material comes from the old business department. The retreat ended last Friday; today we wrap it up.

Jan continued to outdo herself with yet another finished top. In addition, she made backings and bindings for them! What an overachiever! Click here to see her earlier retreat efforts - and everyone else's.

 

Yet another 3-yard quilt.

Flower panels; Jan created this pattern.

 Susan finished her first bunny quilt and proceeded right to work on a second one for her granddaughter. 

Her previous bunny quilt had only 9 blocks.

Terry made a lot of parts of quilts. She brought some labor-intense projects, and made good progress on them, but unlike Jan and Susan, had no finishes. Here are examples of the type of progress she made.

All the pieced blocks are made; all the applique blocks are made. The trouble is that the applique blocks are not large enough. Terry is in the "figure something out" stage, trying to salvage the efforts.
 

This basket quilt will be stunning; I believe the issue she ran into was running out of one of the fabrics.

 I don't have a picture of the pattern for this next quilt, but the borders for it are two rows of HSTs - gah! Can you imagine how daunting it would be to know all these have to be made!?

Can we just take a moment to appreciate how pretty these two fabrics look together!? So perfect. Using triangle papers, Terry made quick and accurate work of these. She went from one row to 4 rows in relatively short order. Although, I am fairly sure that for her it didn't feel like short order!

And these are just for the inner border; remember, there is an outer border of triangles, too. Whew; that's a lot of repetitious sewing, but it will look so fabulous when finished.

As for me, well, like Terry, I did not have any finishes, either. I took the 2018 tub labeled "Blockheads 2." When doing a sampler quilt, the work is full of short bursts of work as the quilter must go block by block. To add to the slow progress, I did a fair amount of "correcting" along the way.

Case in point, the block above was supposed to finish at 12" but mine was a full inch short. Good grief. What had I messed up?

Well, nothing, as it turned out. I just needed to add another tiny row around the block to complete it. Duh.

Another case in point, I completely reworked this large 24" block. Its first incarnation had neutral fabric for the large corner blocks.

After seeing all the smaller blocks alongside this, it was clear that it was too colorless. Now, take a look at this block with some added pizzazz.

Trust me, this works soooo much better! I will have a picture for you of all my blocks in an upcoming post. Someday maybe, there will be a finished quilt top. That is the hope, at least.

I had such good intentions when I started this sew-along *five!* years ago; I always do. The brief history is that I soon realized that my FQ pack would never be adequate for all the blocks, so I spent a good while trying to figure out how to proceed. Eventually, I did find additional era-appropriate fabric to add to the collection, but by that time I had moved on to a gazillion newer projects. The early effort has been collecting dust ever since.

The original FQ pack.

I hope you are having a productive spring day! It's a beaut here today; sunshine and afternoon high in the 70s - perfection!

Happy Quilting, Friends!