Why I love quit retreats

I am back from my quilt retreat and made some significant quilting progress.  I completed the top to the Paper pieced quilt I posted about last time.  THIS is why I love quilt retreats.  If I hadn't gone on retreat, I probably would not have finished this for THREE reasons:

1.  my good friend, Diane, was there to help me back on the paper piecing bicycle. She is a PP expert having done about 5 Judy Neimeyer quilts;

2. I didn't have enough of the fabric I liked for the border but thanks to the tag sale table I found a piece that worked for $3.00 a yard.

3. Since it was a stripe, I thought it would be great with mitered corners. Of course, I haven 't done them in years. But over at the next table, another quilting friend helped me through the process and I was able to get 'er done!  I loved how it turned out.

I had packed two jelly roll race quilts to do which are now complete. The first was all my random scraps that I thought matched to make a lap quilt for my cousin in New Hampshire. I visited with her a couple of weeks ago after not seeing her for about 3 years! We had such a great visit. We promised that 3 years were not going to go by before we saw each other again. Anyway, the lap quilt turned out big enough for two. I am going to cut this in half and add borders so there will be his and her lap quilts.

The second one is all my old Christmas fabric cut into strips. On this one, I counted out 40 strips. I have enough strips for another one! I think this one will go to Bella a/k/a Rapunzel. She told her teacher on the first day of school that her name was Rapunzel when they finally squeezed her real name out of her, she told them that Rapunzel was her ALIAS!! How does a 4 year old come up with that?!  LOL!

All in all, a successful retreat. I was also able to get caught up with my sampler blocks and I did quite a bit of reading and relaxing which were greatly needed.

 While I never fell off of the quilting bandwagon, it is nice to be back on the blogging bandwagon!! I have another quilt for later this week. Check back!!