Girl's Weekend Out!

I had a fun and quilty weekend at a Mystery Quilt Retreat with quilt maven Linda Ballard in the lovely Interstate roadstop town of Williams, CA. The retreat was held at Granzella's Inn and took place Friday night through Sunday afternoon.

What, you ask, is a Mystery Quilt? A mystery quilt is a class in which the participant does not know what the finished product will look like. We are given quantities of fabric to bring and desirable values/scales of the fabric prints that will work well with the design. A certain amount of pre-cutting is required so sewing can begin immediately in class.

I met my online "Fat Quarter" friends (this is the name of an email list we've all belonged to for 8 or 9 years). For the ignorant, Fat Quarter does not indicate a body part. A Fat Quarter is a half yard of fabric that is cut in half horizontally (on the fold) making it still a quarter of a yard, but it is now 18" x 22" instead of 9 1/2" x 44". Capisce? Anyway, Kathy B. from Yolo and Molly E. from Sacramento met me at the retreat and our other partner Nancy M. was unable to join us due to family committments.

We are pictured at right: Ms.Jan, Nurse Kathy and Miss Molly. The teacher's sample is pictured behind us. We considered this a "warm up" weekend for a week-long retreat we will have at Sisters, OR next summer when The Stitchin Post hosts the 31st annual Sisters' Outdoor Quilt Show on July 8th. We will spend the week before the show sewing sweat shop style and of course shopping our little hearts out at the local stores.

My fabric was actually out of my stash and they were nearly 20 years old! I picked out some fabrics that I bought in 1987 or 88 for a Christmas quilt for my son Daniel. He was 7 or 8 when I bought the fabric, he's 25 now, but better late than never I guess. =) And, since his sister's quilt took 18 years, so who is he to hope for a better record? I do promise that Mr. B will get his sooner......

I came home in the rain and it has been blustery as can be today with more predicted for the next week. I'm very glad because I wasn't ready to say goodbye to winter. We did have a few nice weeks sitting on the deck at night and those days will be back, but I'm glad to have a few more days of good sewing and film noir weather.