Harry Potter and the Order of the Quilters

Yes its a Fabric Post!

It finally had arrived, the Quilt Patch Quilt Retreat!! This is something I look forward to all year long and now I cant believe I have to wait a whole year for the next one. I have had people (who are non-quilters) ask me “ what do you do at a quilt retreat?” I'm pretty sure I gave some sort of weird look and replied “I quilt”…”All weekend long?”, and with a huge smile on my face I say “Yes ALL WEEKEND LONG!” It’s really a quilters dream. At home you have all of the everyday distractions, like kids, housework, pets, husbands, ect. Here you have none of that! Well except the constant snacking and roaming around you do when you are fed up with that stupid seam or those 200 little 2’’ squares you have to cut out. (that Irish Luck seemed like a good idea at the time right Chris?) Those are the interruptions that are fun, because they include talking about quilting with likeminded people and there is always a glass of wine in hand.

Honestly this is clean for me.

The retreat is located at Wood Acers here in Moose Jaw, so I have the added bonus of being able to go home and make my own food to take back to the retreat. I could also choose to I could sleep at home, but I like the fact of sleeping there. Being able to go to bed and get up whenever I wanted was really handy. The thing that was a little time consuming was having to go home each morning and make the meals. But I think if I was more organized and enlisted the help from my amazing husband it would go a lot smoother.

This is only half of the sewing area we had.
Loved having those windows!

Thursday night kicked off at 4:00 with setting up of our stations, followed by supper and show and tell. For supper that night I brought 8 spring rolls, yes eight!! And as I am sitting down to eat the lady sitting across from me asks what I brought, I replied “Fresh Rolls! I live off these things!” She then takes a look at my rather large container and says “Oh so that’s your weekend supply?”.......”Nope, this is my supper” .... “You’re going to eat ALL of those tonight?”... “Yup, I can eat a lot of them!”

I think the women there were amazed by how much food I actually brought and ate while I was there.

My light in my sewing machine burnt out  :(

Jeanne (sitting) and Jo (with her face covered) from the Quilt Patch 

Jo's quilt from 7 years ago that she just finished!

One of the hardest things about going to a retreat is trying to decide what to work on while you are there. There I was looking into my bag of UFO’s (Unfinished Objects), which is quite full, and didn’t see anything that really wanted to be finished. So to me the logical decision is to.... MAKE SOMETHING NEW! Yes to me this is logical, I have all of this fabric just waiting to be made into something beautiful. So what if my UFO’s sit for just a little bit longer. Next was trying to decide what to make........ then it hit me. HARRY POTTER QUILT! I am pretty sure I yelled this to my husband. DONT YOU THINK THAT WOULD BE AWESOME! I think he just shrugged and said “Ya, sure.” My mind was made up, I was going to do this... except for the pattern.
 
I started to sketch a couple ideas and ended up with something that was fairly simple, to my I guess. I then hit the internet in search of some images I could use for appliqué (I really love appliqué, you can do so much with it) and found some awesome minimalistic prints that were perfect. I did end up drawing a couple of the images, the castle, the wand, the book shelf and the letters flying into the chimney.  Other than that they are not my images so I will not take credit for their awesome work. 

I was so excited to start this quilt. It was going to be a bit of a challenge but I was so determined to finish as much as possible before the weekend was over. So much that on Saturday night at around 11:30pm I ran home to print off more appliqué letters, seeing as the ones I originally had were too big to fit onto the border. I ended up staying up until 3:30am ironing on letters and cutting them out, I am proud to say I was the last one standing :)

I had such a great time, it was really hard to leave on Sunday. In some ways I wish I could do this once a month, think of the projects I could get done!! On the other hand, my wallet and my back thank me that its not! 

Thanks for Reading!

xoxo - N

Starting to applique around the shapes

Laying out the blocks trying to figure out what looks good





 

Sashing done!



The first letter Harry recieved from Hogwarts going down the chimney.

I learned this weekend how to print on fabric using your ink jet printer! So easy.



Cutting out all the letters that I ironed on at 3am.



Almost done! Just have to applique around each letter.
That shouldn't take too long.....