Back from Retreat

I had a marvelous time at the PINS retreat - I always do. It was great to see so many of my PINS friends again. Especially those who've not made it to a retreat in the past year or two.

Jo was a great hostess, and everyone got a lot done. I worked on several projects and am pretty happy with my progress. Jo had tables and cutting and pressing stations spread through the house, so everyone took breaks from sewing to wander around and look at what everyone else was working on. Two new additions to our group were there - Cher from Marathon Quilter and Julie, a sister of Pam and Marcia from the wheat fields of Pomeroy Washington.

I finished the Happy Jack top, finished quilting the sashings on the Fireworks quilt, and sewed 35 string blocks for my next string top. I originally intended for this to be a Chinese Coins quilt, but decided I liked the looks of the strips sewn right next to each other. Gets rid of more strings that way! Unfortunately this didn't seem to make a dent in the box - I can't imagine how many more quilts are there in that box waiting to be born. I'm getting tired of working with strings, however, so after this top is finished I think I'll put them away for awhile.

We had a nice time on Saturday - visiting a couple quilt shops and having lunch out. Both were very lovely shops, and many of the gals found lots of buy. I couldn't believe it - I just wasn't in the mood to buy fabric! I bought a couple yards of a brown, gold and orange homespun to use for a quilt border, a couple quilting stencils, a couple packages of needles, a larger embroidery hoop than the one I have, and that was it. Less than $25! I was so proud of myself!

We ate well - Italian one night, Mexican the next, then lunch out on Saturday then a champagne brunch on Sunday morning. Homemade soup and sandwiches for dinner that night, then Applebee's the last evening. Lots of munchies at Jo's house, plus some marvelous huckleberry wine brought by the Pomeroy girls. Nobody even thought the word "diet" most of the time we were there LOL!

It was hard to come home and head back to work. My shoulder felt pretty good most of the time I was gone, but starting on Thursday it started hurting much worse. I'd increased the number of times I was doing my exercises and I think I might have overdone it. I intended to write this post on Thursday evening but went to bed before 8:00 p.m. instead. I couldn't believe it when I woke up Friday morning - I'd slept almost 12 hours. I did the same thing on
Friday night - lights out before 10:00 p.m. and then discovered it was almost 10:00 a.m. when I got up. Not sure what was going on there - obviously I needed to sleep. I'm not one to stay up sewing a lot at retreats - I got my 8 hours of sleep every night - so it wasn't that. I guess it was just my body's way of dealing with the increased pain. So very frustrating! I'd hoped to try my longarm this weekend but decided that probably wasn't a good idea. So I've been mostly sitting and reading and resting my shoulder.

Enough about that - no one wants to read about my ills. I've put pictures of my projects as well as some of the "quilting times"pictures in this post, and will do another with general retreat pictures.