Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Back from Retreat














As a child, I always looked forward to summer camp. Away from all the usual and ordinary into a time 'set apart'. Last Wednesday noon we left Seattle to drive about 1 1/2 hrs. to an Episcopal church camp where my LQG holds their twice a year (is that bi-annual?) retreat. The Guild has 500 members and the retreats usually have about 90 for the autumn and 80 for the spring retreats. It happens that my 'satellite' group was the group responsible for the planning (and carrying out) of the event. We named it, Spring Chicken. All the dining tables in the dining hall had chicken decorations - potholders we had made [I showed you photos before] that were eventually door prizes. The name tags all had chicken fabric on them. Each meal we had a 'chicken' joke. All in all - quite fun. We worked hard to have lots and lots of door prizes throughout the week-end. It hardly mattered how small the prize, folks just enjoyed being winners of something. We also had a packet of needles for every attendee and a fat quarter of fabric.

There were 18 of us in my sewing space. So here are some of the things we were working on:










I will do my best to make a Picasa album with the collection of photos. We sewed from before breakfast (approx. 7am start time), several of us headed to bed around 10-11 and a few stalwart folks stayed up waaaaaaaay past midnight. I only knew because I could see the lights were still on in the Longhouse, for sewers.

Among the most fun parts of the week-end is the Saturday 'walk about'. Each person is asked to bring one of their quilts and these were put on peoples' beds. And folks walked around to see the 'decorated' bedrooms/dorms. Additionally, each of the sewing rooms was hung with projects complete or in process, so you could see what others were working on. An amazing de facto quilt show. And everyone was so generous with their time and talents and shared information and knowledge with anyone who asked. Need I say fabulous?

Sunday lunch people bring their finished or nearly finished projects to the dining hall for all to see,











Pretty incredible, huh? Really the only sad part of the whole event is that I managed to find a major cold bug and am sneezing and coughing like crazy. But it was great fun and I will sure try to attend again. I know I can't do the fall event, but will put next April on my calendar. Wanna come along?

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Sounds like lots of fun! Hopefully your cold won't last too long. I really enjoyed the pictures.

Jackie said...

please have a semi-annual retreat - I sure you don't want to wait 2 years to have one ;) I think retreats are what restores my quilting soul.

Jossie said...

Retreats are fun. You had quite an event with so many people. The projects you show are beautiful. It really sounds like you had a great time.