Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Girls quilting retreat

Last Wednesday my girlfriends and I took off for 5 days of quilting up at my girlfriends cottage "up north". The leaves were almost at peak color, it was sunny and warm, we packed lots of good food and wine, who could ask for more.




Our view of the lake from the cottage.


The first thing we did was to return each others "row by row" quilt. We began the exchange last September with everyone making their own first row and sending some fabric along if you wanted to for the rest of the rows. It was so exciting to get your quilt back. This was Laura's snowman quilt.



Cathy's black and white with a little spark of color in some of the blocks. (I'm holding them over the living room balcony).





Jody's more subdued quilt to go in her living room.





Joni's quilt for her living room.




Jamie's Christmas quilt. I love the black lattice strips, it makes it very elegant.




And my "Ultimate" Halloween quilt. I took the picture outside on the deck.






The project I worked on I began 15 years ago. I bought some pretreated fabric squares (they were a dirty white color, I can't remember the name of the technique), picked wild flowers from our river property, laid them on the fabric, placed it in the sun for around 10 minutes, then brought them in and rinsed the fabric out in cool water. The fabric turned indigo blue leaving the flower print. I printed 12 of them.
The lattice fabric I ordered years ago, it's cotton from South Africa. I prewashed it quite a few times, the blue keep running.





This is the back of the fabric with their trademark.




This is the beginning of the quilt, the next set of boarders will have the same white stars pieced in them.




Laura pieced and quilted two Halloween quilts for her twin grand kids.





Laura also took her sons favorite Hawaiian shirts from high school, unsewed them and pieced them into a surprise birthday quilt. He was a football player and every Friday the team wore their Hawaiian shirts to school, lots of fun memories. Some of the blocks still have the pockets and the button flaps on them.




Cathy's daughter in law is a music teacher at our local school. This is for her for Christmas. The outer boarder is choir singers.
This is just a few of the tops that were pieced during our stay.


We also took walks collecting leaves.





I brought premordanted silk scarves for everyone. We laid the leaves on them, rolled them up tight, and simmered them awhile. They took them home to unwrap after a few days.



Jamie and I played around pounding leaves on muslim.




Our group photo, what a wonderful time. Thank you Laura!
















1 comment:

Deb Hardman said...

Waaa, I want to go too! It looks like so much fun, & you are all so productive! Colors on the leaves ae o pretty.. My dad was telling me hownice its been. It's fun to see pictues of old friends.

Those blocks are sun prints. I still have minein a baggie somewhere, the floral prints that is. I did get the snowflakes intoa quilt in 1998.

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