Quilting Retreat

Back this weekend from a quilting retreat on Thursday and Friday in the western Adirondacks. Lots of funny friends, good food, and sewing until the wee hours of the morning. Only took two projects to work on for the two days...hand-quilting on the last border of a mystery quilt and sewing Sunflowers for a reproduction quilt. I'm finding that hand-quilting is becoming more difficult if I work for long periods of time as it aggravates some of my finger joints and definitely my carpal tunnel tendencies (numb fingers). It's a pain getting older.

The other quilters laughed at my rather unorthodox method of piecing the latticework for the Sunflower blocks first and then using applique to insert the round blocks.

The holes in the quilt look rather odd, I admit, but I only had a certain amount of the red fabric and wanted to make sure I had enough to make the framework! As it was, I had to piece some of it, but the curved arcs cover nearly all of the seams and the small dots on the fabric make the seams almost disappear. Here are some of the blocks I completed last Thursday to fill in some of the "holes!"

This pattern was from Nancy Martin's Pieces of the Past, but was one of the only quilts in the book that there was no pattern for - out came the graph paper and my pencils!