Liberating Weekend Quilt-In

This weekend was our first Quilt-In of the new year. Long ago, our quilt group voted not to have a traditional quilt retreat and instead we would have a stay at home retreat. We start at 3:00 on a Thursday and go until 3:00 (or longer) on Saturday. You sew when you can make it, come and go when your days are like that and run home to feed the dogs, family or just pick something up that you left. Even though we could, if we wanted, stay all night, we all elect to return to our beds and come back in the mornings. It has been a wonderful arrangement. Sometimes we have a planned project, but our favorite time is when we work on our own stuff. This weekend I worked on my Mon Ami quilt for the Le Petite Challenge. I have been meticulously squaring up every half-square triangle and it has been slow going. I should have never done that to the first one, because it turned out so perfect, that when I didn't square up the fourth one, I decided I didn't like how it looked and have gone back to squaring each one. Let's see that is 8 HST per block at 25 blocks that is 200 - 2 1/2" hst's!! I haven't even gotten to the sawtooth border yet! With having to finish up finals and getting my grades in for the semester, our meeting on Saturday, feeding the dogs and working on a rwb block (more later) I only got 10 blocks totally completed. I have the other squares sewn, but not squared. I still have a couple of weeks to get this done. If I sew a little bit each day, it will be finished in no time. hopefully.


Pictured below is my friend Diana's quilt she made in Debbie Caffrey's Stir Fry class in December. She used blocks leftover quilt blocks and made some during the year when I suggested patterns in our newsletter. She is having the best time quilting it. Just doing whatever the block speaks to her - machine quilting, hand quilting and tying. She is even going to do some machine embroidery on it! It was fun to watch her and Molly work on laying it out and fun to see the top as she quilts it.
Molly brought this quilt to show me because of all the bright colors. I love it!! Not only because of the brights, but because it is all blocks that are liberated and wonky. Molly and Diana made similar quilts using all the patterns from Gwen Marston's Liberated Quilt books. To hear them talk about their process, they each have the books, now, and they get on the phone and sew and quilt at their own houses, together! Too funny. It is a beautiful quilt. They were both jealous when I told them I was going to be taking classes from Gwen in March. I just love wonky and liberated stuff.



Speaking of which, I made a funky star block to donate to our ROTC raffle quilt. I had to add borders to get it to the right size. I had never made lopsided funky stars inside a funky star before. I was inspired by a couple of blocks from Molly's quilt. I will have to make a couple more of these for my stir fry quilt - still haven't blogged about that yet - just to have some more fun.