This year's retreat is now behind us . . . only about 350 days until the next one. Everyone seemed to have a good time. I was fighting a cold . . . and losing . . . but I really did manage to get a lot done, which isn't always the case. On Thursday evening, I made a scrub top for my friend, Linda G. She was the birthday girl a few months back. I found a fabric I couldn't resist that was a cute pink, with little green frogs on it. I had good intentions of making it before Camp, but I seem to have wandered down that road that good intentions sometimes get you on! Anyway, a reprieve from the governor . . . or actually, from her aunt. While Linda G. went out to dinner with her aunt, I cut out and assembled the scrub top, and tucked it carefully into her little gift bag at her sewing station. I wasn't at my station when she returned and found it. The other girls said she pulled it out of the bag, and looked at it, peeled off her shirt, and put it on. She found me upstairs in the dining room a few minutes later. She threw open the door and jumped into the room, and pranced around, modeling the shirt. She said it had my name all over it. So, I wasn't successful with that surprise, but I did manage to pull off one or two others. Friday morning, I worked on some Kansas Troubles blocks, completing about eleven of them. Then I switched to a basket quilt in a strippy set that needed to be set together. Managed to get all the floral stripes in between the baskets, and only need to add the rose-colored border on the outside. Next up was some 6-inch patchwork blocks to make a border for an aging BOM in my stash. Got those all made and attached to the sides of the quilt top, thereby making it wider. I made two blocks for the Quilts of Valor camp project. Enough blocks were turned in by Campers to make three quilts for that project. I polished off the weekend by tracing freezer paper templates for a house quilt project, and slid into home on a few Kab-net wax foundation blocks in brights. I actually worked on every single project that I brought to Camp . . . a new record!
One of the cutest interpretations for this year's Retreat, "Run for the Border", was Lanna and Sossity's room assignments and name tags. They identified one wing of the building as Canada and one as Mexico. The individual rooms had names of the provinces or states. I was assigned to Ontario. Our name tags were wooden US maps with our names woodburned into them. And everyone got a Passport, with our nationality for the weekend in it . . . we were all age 29 for the weekend. The center of the Passport was the weekend's agenda. Each passport had a cover on it with a seal. They really look official. It was the greatest!
Door prize people, Barb and Moreen, really were over the top. We even had a few extra door prizes, which came in handy when a couple members who couldn't come to stay made a visit. They were certainly surprised when their names were called!
Next year's theme is "Hooray for the Red, White and Blue", since it is an election year. We will have some complete patriotic quilt patterns, as well as blocks based in election campaign slogans, the most obvious being "Old Tippecanoe". One of my "partners in crime" is also all wired up, and designing a project for next year's camp. Should be fun!
