Stay at home retreat

I've been having a solo stay-at-home quilt retreat this weekend.  I took Friday as a vacation day and have been quilting all weekend.

On Friday, I pulled out a set of swap blocks from the "Romp in the Swamp" with The Quilting Post friends.  Because we had a retreat in Louisiana, our swaps were Southern or Louisiana themed.  The set I worked with this weekend was stars in Mardi Gras colors - green, gold and purple.   Sashing, backing, and binding are all from stash.  The quilting on this one is a freehand ribbon meander - sort of like streamers.  I even had a batt and thread in the stash that worked for this one

I'm calling this Mardi Gras.  The binding is sewn on the front, but still needs to be turned and hand stitched to the back.















I just took off the machine another quilt from swap blocks, also through TQP.  This is a from a swap of 6" blocks in 30's reproduction prints.  I got some half-circle templates yesterday, and quilted this with Baptist fans. 
This also has the binding applied, but still needing to be stitched to the back.

The next set of blocks I"m working on is much older - these are from a 1995 swap, on Genie, I think.  We had a group of 25, each of us picked a focus fabric and a Judy Martin block pattern.  We sent a piece of our focus fabric to each person, and we all made our selected block in the different fabrics.  My focus fabric was a teal background with wheat-brown flowers and purple leaves.  I've put my blocks up on the design wall (looks like I did not make my own block in my focus fabric....)

I want this to be a bed-size quilt, so I'm going to do some type of sashing, and maybe a series of borders - narrow inner border, then a pieced border of some sort, then maybe a final narrow border.  I went to the LQS yesterday and found to pieces of brown that go well with the brown in my focus fabric, and one piece of wine that matches one of the leaf colors, so I've got something to work with.  I think I'll play with some designs in EQ before I start cutting anything.

Oh, and all of the pictures today are from my new camera.  I was having a lot of trouble getting clear pictures with my old camera, so I got a new Canon PowerShot SD1300IS.  I like it so far.

Time to find some lunch.   DH will be back from his mini-vacation in a little while, so I'll probably stay out of the sewing room this evening.