January Finishes and Retreat

I love January, as that is the  month my quilt club, Stitchin Friends, goes on retreat to a local church sponsored camp site near my house.  Its only about 20 minutes away, so if I, or any of the other ladies, forget something, its easy enough to run home and get it - or better yet, have someone bring it to us.  This year there was 12 of us, and we had so much fun as well as accomplished a lot.

At retreat, I did a demo on Quilt As You Go, and used my 2016 Aurifil BOM blocks in teaching this process.  I quilted each block with a different design using the auto feed (built in walking foot) on my Janome 6600 machine.  This was so much fun and a process I plan to use on many quilts to come

Linda, a dear friend who came to retreat without a project to work on and who I put to work right away, hemmed the quilt as well as doing some of the hand stitching on the back of the quilt.  So nice to have an "assistant" at retreat!

I have a close up of each block at the end of this post, along with the quilting pattern used on the block. 

 Also at retreat, Linda and Donna worked on hemming my Galaxy Star quilt which will be a gift to my grandson Toby in February.  Its his big boy quilt from moving from a crib to a bed, which he did about 4 years ago!

I quilted it on my Janome 6600, doing a cross hatch stitch on the stars and a free motion meandering between the stars. 

I was concerned that it might be too dark a quilt for little boy, but his mom said he is into Star Wars these days, and this would be a perfect quilt for him.  Now to get the label made

Also at retreat, my dear friend Linda hemmed a baby quilt for me that I finished just before retreat.  Its a Schnibbles pattern.  The parents are not finding out the gender until after the baby is born, so I just used a primary color palette and hopefully this will work out ok.

Guess I really got worn out with all the fun at retreat cause I made a whopper of a booboo on my Jack's Chain yesterday morning.  I got up early and did a little hand stitching while enjoying my  morning coffee. Shortly afterwards,  Linda, who was spending a few days after retreat with me, joined me and we enjoyed chatting and talking about the retreat.  Eventually my husband joined us as well.  So when I laid the quilt out to "admire" my progress was I in for a surprise.

That block you see standing up is not being pushed up by anything - that is actually how I had sewn it in.  I have no idea how in the world I did that, but there it was, standing nice and proud.  Needless to say, that morning's work was ripped out.

Yesterday I started on the Pemberley quilt, but more on that later.  Its just what I needed...another new project.

As promised here are some closeups of the 2016 Aurifil Blocks, which I am calling the quilt the Machine Quilting Sampler.




Clamshell




Spiral



Cross Hatch




Diamond




Expanded ZigZag




Improvisational




Organic



Point to Point



Point to Point



Point to Point

Orange Peel



Spiral

What I did on New Year's Day

I have always heard that what you do on the first day of a new year, you will do all year long.  So here is what I did today, and can only hope and pray the good times continue throughout the year.  I hope all of your New Year's Days were filled with family and friends.

My day started early around 5:00 and with machine quilting on  Toby's birthday quilt for February.  This is a Galaxy Star quilt and will be partly machine quilted with my auto feed foot, and partly with free motion quilting.  This is going to take me awhile to complete, but is still so much faster than hand quilting.













My whole family gathered at my house today for our traditional family dinner of pork roast, sauerkraut, lima beans, black-eyed peas, mashed potatoes and various desserts.  So today I cooked for my family.  I just had to make the port roasts and get the sauerkraut - everybody brought the remainder of the food items.  It was such a fun day, and my heart was full as was my house too.  There was a total of 23 of us and I had table set up on the living room, kitchen and dining room. 

But before they arrived and while the pork roasts cooked, I got a little English Paper Piecing in on my Jack's Chain quilt.

It is soooooooo cold today, I had the gas logs going in the living room and so enjoy stitching and watching the fire.

The remainder of the pictures are family groupings.