November Retreat

This year, my retreat group decided to stay closer to home.  Historically, we would rent a beach house up island about 3 hours away in Bowser.  After last year, we decided to see if we could find a different place in Sooke which is about an hour away.  The criteria was pretty simple...plenty of room to sew, a kitchen where we could create our own meals, comfy beds (with no sharing).

We found Anderson Cove Guest House and booked it!  Right on the water in beautiful Sooke.  It offered an ample dining room for sewing and a huge kitchen with another table for mealtime.  Perfect!

We stopped for lunch together on our way out (all but our kindred spirit, Pam from Okanagan Falls who met us there).  After room allocation was done, we set up to get sewing. 

Dining room sewing station

I always bring more projects than humanly possible to complete.  I'm kind of driven that way.  I just never know what will inspire me.  I choose to work with my inspiration.

My first goal was to finish a baby quilt for my grand-nephew who is due to make an appearance in
February, but the baby shower is December 10th.  This was a free pattern from Moda Bakeshop and the instructions were wrong but with help (thank you Pam!) we managed to decipher the count and get assembly started.

And finished!

Next up was to finish this Monkey Quilt.  A former colleague commissioned me to make a quilt for her granddaughter for Christmas, so this too had a deadline.  The only criteria was it had to have monkeys.  I found one and only one fabric at Cloth Castle that had monkeys.  Apparently it's the year for other critters and I always find myself searching for the last trend, a few years late!  However, I came homewith some monkey fabric and had the blocks all done before the retreat and I just needed to assemble them.

This is the Warm Wishes pattern by Project Linus from Quiltmaker.  I finished putting on turquoise borders last night and am sending it for longarm quilting tomorrow.  With Christmas looming, lots of overtime at work, I decided in order to free me from stress and meet the delivery deadline for my former colleague, I needed to delegate something and the quilting of this quilt was it.  I'm sure my friend Jan Symonds at Victoria Sunshine Studio will do a fine job.  Stay tuned for pictures.

Finally, after those two projects were done, I pulled out my Razzle Dazzle WIP (work in progress).  This was to be my quilting cruise project but became a home project when Crafttours informed us that there would be no sewing machines on our cruise afterall.  My rant is over about that and this quilt needs to be made!

I'm departing totally from Bonnie's colourway.

I did manage to get all of the alternate green/yellow setting blocks done but really struggled with the contrast between them and the main blue/yellow star blocks.  I've now settled on keeping them.  What did it for me was seeing a small thumbnail photo on my phone and being drawn to the image.  Oh good!  I really needed to settle it once and for all.  And this is what I'm going with.  Everything else seemed too washed out.  So am I happy?  Yes.  I have a special recipient for this quilt and that will be shared later.

The 2016 Quiltville mystery is about to launch so I will be posting more about that in a few days.  It's a very exciting time of year for quilters around the world.  If you haven't heard about it, check out Bonnie Hunter's blog at www.quiltville.blogspot.com and click on the En Provence tab.

Until next time,

Mavis