Seattle MQG Retreat

I spent this past weekend at the Seattle MQG retreat on Vashon Island. I had a great time, sewed a ton, ate good food that I didn't have to make, didn't sleep enough, and came home happy to see my family and watch the Big Game last night.

One of the things I've been wanting to make good progress on is my scrap block quilt. I started making 6.5" scrap blocks sometime in 2011(in Kansas) and have worked on them off and on since then. I've made about 35 since the end of December. Here's the final stack:

 

I had a number in mind when I was finishing up the light blues and dark blues, but I ended up with more than I expected. I had to make one more block at the retreat to finish up the last row, and it was kind of fun to use scraps that a few different people gave to me for that.

This is the final layout:

and then here's what it looked like all sewn together (but not pressed yet.)

 

This was an instagram photo and the bottom row is cut off. The quilt has 117 blocks in it.

I pressed all the row seams open this morning and I'm hoping to get it ready to quilt later on this week. 

I worked on a couple other things too, here's a few more scrappy trip along blocks:

 

I have 21 of them now, not sure how many I will end up with.

And I participated in a group Improv Round Robin session which was a ton of fun. We had groups of 4 people, and each person started with her own fabric and then passed it to the next person in the group a total of 3 times, so we all ended up working on each others' quilts. Here's my mini after Louise, Debbie, Chandra and I all worked on it:

I'm not sure if I'm going to add more piecing or not, but it's a beautiful start and it was so fun to work with my group on this. I think I'd like to do this on a bigger scale someday, too. 

Overall the retreat was such a good experience. I didn't know anybody in the group really well before going, but I feel like I made friends and it was so cool to get to know people better in a setting of sewing and chatting all day long.