Quilt Retreat

My local quilt guild had our Spring retreat. My sister and I went, and I am just so glad we did. It was a blast to get to be away with no distractions and just SEW! There were some fun little activities scattered throughout. The theme was Back at the Barnyard. We had a hat contest, the only requirement was to use the flowers provided. I won most creative with my upside down planter/chick hatching hat. I won a cute little jar lantern. There were some really creative ideas. We also played barn yard games, an egg toss, hot potato, and a cow chip tossing contest. I won the cow chip tossing contest, and won some brown (manure) colored fat quarters. I worked on a pinwheel quilt (they are doing pinwheel quilts on ORBC flickr group), and actually got the top all put together. Now I'm trying to decide if I want a border on it or not. I also made my guild name tag. After those two things were done I started a circle quilt. We actually got to know the ladies in our guild. It's a challenge to get to know people at the meetings, but this was great. There are so many wonderful ladies in our guild. (I have more pictures but am having an awful time uploading, will try to add more tomorrow) I joined a flickr online quilting bee, called The Stitchin Bee. We just started, and Kelly is up first. Kelly is making a quilt to use at the beach so she wanted it really colorful. The only requirements were to make a 12 inch block with the fabrics sent, and include the little comic piece of fabric. The only way I could think of was a string block. So now, I just need to mail it back to Kelly.

I finished my potholders for The Potholder Pass 2 swap, so I just need to mail them off to my partner. The only thing I had to go on here was a list of colors my gal likes.

Swaps

Recently I signed up for two swaps . The first was a new sew block exchange hosted by Kathleen. My choice was Star of Virginia for the red, white, and blue group. I finally got my fabric cut today, well almost. I decided to sew my block together to see how it looked.

I had a whole bunch of white squares left, the fabric that I ran short on. I was so mad at myself for messing up the cutting. I looked at the pattern again and realized I should have followed the directions and not just gone on memory. After a lot of time with my seam ripper I found it's actually to look like this:

So yes, I still need a little of the white fabric, but I'll hopefully have the block kits in the mail by the end of the week.

The other swap is an I Spy swap. Now that I signed up and explained it to my boys they both want an I Spy quilt so I guess I'm going to have to find another one to sign up for so I can get more blocks to work with. Here are the fabrics I purchased for this swap.

Hopefully I'll get to the post office by this weekend because I have a lot of things I need to mail out.

A big thank you!

Thanks to Anya from over at the Hills Creek Quilter! I signed up on her Pay it Forward post. Last week I recieved a box in the mail. Apparently the box alone was enough of a gift because my youngest played in it for a long time.

Anya made me this beautiful bag out of my favorite colors! She also included a pillowcase for each of the boys. They were very excited!

The bag has now become the "Grandmother's flower garden quilt bag". I can easily carry it with me so that whenever i am somewhere and have a few minutes for hand sewing I can work on it. Hopefully it will inspire me to maybe finish it.

So thank you so much for your kindness, it is greatly appreciated.