Away with friends

Its the much-anticipated annual retreat – the one that involves long-standing quilting pals, a four-star hotel, good food and time to catch up on news, gather thoughts, make plans and maybe even do some stitching.  We have the use of a small conference suite so we can spread out with all our fabric and gadgets – this year everyone else is busy sewing and I appear to be glued to the laptop.  Not sure how that has happened, although I have brought a couple of stitching projects along just in case!  So here’s an indication of some of the activity -

No prizes for guessing that one of our company is Katharine Guerrier – her retreat project is to use up a whole stack of “leftover” quilt blocks of various sizes to make a new quilt top

and so far it’s looking pretty good for a “rescue” project.  We’ve each had a copy of the new Rainbow Disks  title Little Welsh Quilts by Mary Jenkins, which also looks pretty good – of course we’re all far too busy to sit down and look at it right now, but it will be something to savour when we get home

- and you’ll find Mary’s blog here for lots of other lovely things.

Hiding in a basket of fabric that arrived at the retreat was this small piece -

- from my first range of fabrics for Rose & Hubble in the 1990s, and still one of my favourites.  I’m confiscating this  taking this home to join all the others, and I might even get around to taking a few pictures and reminding myself of what the various ranges looked like …

One of the projects on my “retreat to do” list is to sort out my website and bring it up to date – not a difficult task, it will just need a little focus and concentration – and include my new pattern book on the relevant page.  Whether I achieve this or not I did want to offer a first glimpse of  the lovely work of the Volunteer Crew who so willingly made samples of some of the patterns for the book -

Maggi got carried away (in a good way) and interpreted her given design in shadow quilting using her own hand-dyed silks and sheers -

 

With samples of this quality the book should be a best-seller – thanks ladies!  full links and credits in an upcoming post …

Before I escaped  left home for the retreat I was also sorting out quilts for my exhibit at the Open European Quilt Championships in May and laying them out on a bed well away from the attentions of three prowling cats.  On our bed there’s a well-worn white strippy-style quilt  which gets covered in muddy paw prints from time to time – it always intrigues me that even the simplest quilted texture looks incrediby rich in the right light

Happy stitching!

 

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