Ready for a retreat

I guess I'd better post something here, first because Judy told me to :-) and second because it's been a really long time. I keep waiting for pictures, but I'm at work now and I have a few minutes to write, but I don't have any pictures. So I'll try to add some pictures after I get home tonight.

This weekend is my guild's annual quilting retreat, and I just can't wait. A weekend of nothing but quilting is such a luxury for me. I'm always focused and productive at these retreats and I expect nothing less from this year's. My guild usually has a class for the weekend, but I will be doing my own thing since I'm not buying any new fabric. My first project for the weekend will be a new quilt that I started a couple of weeks ago. Here's the story. There is a girl in DH's school (he's a high school math teacher) who has been diagnosed with leukemia. She was in the hospital for 26 days and will go back in a week for a second round of chemo. She is a great girl and has been one of our best babysitters for the last couple of years. Anyway, I came up with the idea of doing a quilt for her and letting the kids at the school sign it so Angie can wrap herself up in the love of all of her friends. I picked a pattern out of the latest issue of Quick Quilts (you can see a picture of it by going here) and started trying to figure out what kinds of fabric I would use. After all, I'm not buying any new fabric, so it had to be something I could pull from my stash. I wanted to use brights, but I have a pretty small stash of those. However, I bought some Laurel Burch fabrics a couple of years ago and I somehow managed to find enough fabric in my stash to make it work. The quilt has 30 blocks and I really wanted to have 30 different fabrics as the centers. I had enough 10" squares from a swap I did a few years ago to do it. I had enough fabric left over from a backing for another quilt to use for the solid sashings (that's where the students will sign), so I'm all set. I've already pieced the blocks with the solid sashings and I've got the fabric for all of the HST's cut and ready to go through my machine. I even cut up all of the leftover scraps into 2" squares to use for my leaders and enders. This is a quilt that has to be done this weekend and I'll probably have the top done on Friday night.

The other quilts that I'm taking to work on are the two Star Fling quilts that I'm doing for my daughters and the blocks from my applique quilt. So tomorrow night I'll be cleaning my machine ( my wonderful Featherweight ), winding some bobbins, and packing everything up for my wonderful weekend away from home. Yippee!!!