AAQ Retreats, Livermore CA (Session 1, Day 3)

Every year I watch people arrive with piles of fabric and a bunch of good ideas. They shop for more fabric, discuss their ideas with their fellow retreaters, ask Alex and me questions, and sew and sew and sew. I showed some pictures yesterday of what some people were starting to work on and took these pictures this afternoon so you can see all the progress that was made.

People who come here can work on anything they want, although there is always an optional project that relates to whatever Alex and I are teaching. This year's project is Alex's pattern "Holiday Lights Updated!", which worked perfectly with her isoceles triangle lesson. Above are the two quilts on the cover of Alex's pattern.

My quilt using this triangle shape is called "Aboriginal Dance" and differs in that my triangles are pieced before the side pieces are added to the triangle to form the rectangular block.

Here are some of the other tree projects as of early this evening:

Jean and Karen were both working on red trees and backgrounds; I can't honestly say which trees belong to which sewer because they were both on the same design board for a while and then somebody moved! Unfortunately, when that move was made, my brain didn't make the transition...

Those are Carol's blue and white trees on the left and Sylvia's plaid trees on the right. What I liked about everybody's trees was the wide variety of fabrics used to make the blocks look so different.



Sue's pink trees on varied grey backgrounds was striking and really different.

Diane's was unique in that she used one background fabric for all of the blocks, but a lot of different shades of green for the trees. When I took this picture, she was trying to decide on a fabric to applique the cord that strings the tree lights in the border.

There were quite a few people who weren't working on the trees, but had brought plenty of other things to have fun with...

Erica pieced a kit called "Midnight Dreams" from Sew Batik. It finishes 56"x68" and when I commented on how pretty the fabrics were, Erica told me that it was all actually one fabric that has many different designs printed on it. The one fabric is cut into strips according to the directions to get all the different batik prints that you see in the quilt.


Sheila's log cabin.....

Linda's small and complex projects. If you compare this to yesterday's blog post, you can see that the star is a bit larger and that she added the little bitty house and tree quilt to her design board. When she was showing this quilt, she was referring to "big trees" and "little trees", but I for the life of me can't see a big tree in there!!

Sharon Garcia from our lovely state of Hawaii was sewing nearby and wrote down a Hawaiian name for Linda: it is "Ka loea humupuali'i , which means "the expert quilter of intricate beauty". Yep, sure looks like she deserves it!

Mel made lots of aprons, which we all fell in love with, and a little Christmas quilt. I'll be posting the Show & Share quilts next week and Mel showed a couple of embellished quilts that were absolutely to die for -- a lady of many artistic talents!



Judy is a newcomer to AAQ Retreat and she was working on this red/white/black quilt top. I believe that it is called bento boxes, but wouldn't swear to that....

Dawna got all of her basket blocks sewn, sashed and the setting and corner triangles cut and ready to go. As fast as she sews, it wouldn't be a surprise if she had at least one border on before she leaves tomorrow.

My next post will have a couple of announcements about next year's retreats and then I'll be ready to start photographing Session II tomorrow afternoon!