Retreat Success!

 Well, after a whirlwind holiday, I am back. 

Fatigued and tired but ready to jump back into my quilting.

The beautiful Bahamas were a wonder to behold.

It is a must on my future bucket 

 list of a place to revisit.

We stayed at a beautiful rental property on 

Grand Exuma. The top of the list for 

crazy things we did is:

swim with pigs

and visit an island inhabited only by hundreds of iguana.

The clearest water I've ever seen and also the 

cleanest pigs!

We had a 10-hour delay returning 

to the country but now that 

we're back in Canada it's time to face the music.

 Do housework, get into quilting and

shop for my own groceries.

Living this the life of a spoiled tourist 

is fun but not realistic!

Upon return, I was scheduled to go to a weekend quilting retreat.

I managed to make it but was a bit fatigued.

 I did have to excuse myself for an afternoon nap or two.

All my quilting goods were packed before I left 

so I trusted my planning and just loaded the car.

 Here is what I  worked on .

Since I was tired from travelling,

 I chose something simple for the first night.

I made binding for five Irish chain quilts . The tops are 

almost ready and most of the backings are already chosen!  

Now they need to be pinned and quilted up.

It was a very good night's work.

The next morning, after consulting my retreat notebook, 

I jumped right in to finishing a years old project.

Once again I discovered why I have UFOs. 

This poor project had a few errors

The first was my use of fusible web to put

 a bunch of small squares together. 

The original pattern from Quiltmaker March 2014, 

called for 1 1/2"  squares.

 Way too small for my clumsy quilting

 at the time, so I used 2" squares. 

This required a bit of adjustment for the sewing.

Since this project was done over a time (years)

by the time I got to the final blocks,

I had forgotten that  each row should end with a white square.

The large center squares were fine but the

smaller alternate blocks needed fixing. 

Then I assembled the top and realized 

the outside corner squares had 

interfacing showing through also, so more fixing there. 

Now all it needs is an interesting border treatment.

The top already measures 84" square. 

I usually work between 84" and 88".

 The border for this quilt needs to be very narrow so 

 I will put either a 1" zinger  or use  2" cut 

square on point all the way around.

Here is a picture of it so far. 

As I am not a fine machine quilter and 

this will have a lot of seams, 

this will be professionally

 quilted at one of my local quilt shops.

There are still  four quilting credits on my punch card 

 so this will be one of the four to use up that card.

Here is a picture of the water bird that 

visited daily while we were on vacation. 

He was just looking for a sip of less salty water. 

Stay safe and sew on!

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