Wednesday morning was the official start to the retreat. We spent the first part getting a nice show and tell by Gwen. This first string quilt had me so intrigued. So intrigued, in fact, that I went out and bought some of the light background fabrics (civil war repros) to try this myself! I don't usually have civil war fabrics in my stash, but these are pretty cool with the mostly solid strings and this seems like a good masculine style of quilt.
I love this happy string quilt too. Wonderful colors.
This one was recently in one of the magazines and I really like it too. It's definitely fueling my string obsession.
This is a lovely quilt that I have seen before, but it really is striking and a lot of fun to hear the story about how it went together. It looks pretty formal, but if you look carefully, you'll see that the blocks are not identical. The casual nature came about because Gwen worked on the blocks individually while traveling and did not have the previous blocks with her to compare the leaf placement.
Gwen's family quilt is the piece de resistance! I love this one so much and was inspired to bring a photo copy of it to BIQR (since I couldn't bring all of my books). I was thrilled to be able to study it in person. The quilt represents all the things that bring joy to Gwen's life, including her children and her pets.
It was really great to see this up close. Each animal has their name quilted in beside them. Below, she pointed out the mother hen and her two chicks, one of whom was a rooster!
After that, the sewing began and went right through to dinner time. Since I couldn't bring my whole stash, I carefully sorted out all my solid scraps to bring. This pile did get turned into something that I'll show in the next post.