Beach Bumming

We had a fun sewing day at Cocoa Beach Saturday. My guild buddy has a gorgeous place on the beach. It's paradise. I wish I could win the lottery. A beach house would be high on the shopping list. Being at the beach is so relaxing. I love everything about it. Maybe I should actually play the lottery.

We sewed in the rec room. Break time was a stroll on the nearly deserted beach. The water was a little too cool for a dip, but the weather was exquisite. We finally had a perfect spring day. April has been a steamy scorcher. It was like we went straight to summer. This weekend was cooler.

Alejandrina made a huge spread of gourmet goodies. She has the largest collection of cookbooks I've ever seen. I could spend weeks browsing through her cookbooks. I love how they're all on a wall in her kitchen. Lunch was falafel with tahini sauce, meatballs with tzatziki, chicken salad, roasted vegetables with vinaigrette and a spinach and cheese strata. Oh my word! Everything was so good.

I chose an easier project as we get talking and anything complicated gets messed up quickly. I've made this jelly roll quilt before and I remember it being fun and easy. And I loved the results. I think it's the only pattern I've ever duplicated. It was a last minute decision as I threw my stuff into the bag before leaving.

The fabric line is "Ashton Road" by Valori Wells. Jelly rolls are fun sometimes. Not a lot of thinking since it all kinds of goes together. I made 20 of these strip sets.

Then sub cut them today into 3.5" sections. Here they are all stacked up and ready to be paired into blocks. That will have to wait until my next sewing session. This laundry ain't doing itself.

Someone was no help. Note fabric scraps on carpet. How did those get way over there? I can't disturb Mr. Bones with the vacuum cleaner, so they stay. Well that's my story and I'm sticking with it. Have a great week.

Let's Paint

Hard to believe it's been a week since I was retreating on the East coast with fellow quilters. We all brought several projects to work on and I believe everyone accomplished quite a bit. But it wasn't about deadlines for me, I was just there to sew. And eat. My favorite things. Affiliate link alert ahead.

Kathryn, wowed us with a demonstration using Inktense pencils and water soluble pastels. She brought several of her masterpieces, which were so inspiring. Then she let us play with her colors. I think more than a few of us are asking Santa for these sets.

I colored on some flowers that Kathryn had stitched up. She's a master quilter too. Girl has mad skills.

Kathryn also showed us how to use the pastels to create silk screen images. You simply color an image on the screen and use medium to squeegee the image onto fabric. How fun is that?

I whipped up another I Spy fabric book for my little cousins. Big sister loves the one I made her, so I made one for her to read to her new brother. He was born on Halloween, so I used some Halloween fabric for the cover. The blue crabs are our family's favorite, and football is big in that family too.

I brought a bag of selvages and sewed them down on muslin. Not sure where these will end up. Somewhere.

Loaded baked potato soup for dinner last night. I threw some diced tomatoes on as a garnish. I wanted to make a Thai red curry soup, but college boy and the Inspector probably preferred the potato soup. Whatever, it has cheese and bacon in it and I didn't have any cilantro for Thai cooking. I've also been craving beef and barley soup. I could make soup every day.

Sunday Stash #78

  

Our guild meeting at the fabric shop and the retreat shopping trip resulted in a few fun goodies. The last two photos were spoils from an adorable scrap bag I had to have. The funny bunnies caught my eye, but I love all the transportation prints too. All of the scrap pieces were very large, so I'll be able to have lots of fun with them.

This cute baby quilt was hanging in the guest house I shared with my roommate. Hi Marge! The retreat location was wonderful and we had a lot of fun. There were quilts everywhere, but I forgot to get photos of all of them.

I loved this double wedding ring quilt. It had some fun fabrics.

We set up our machines in the schoolhouse and got busy with our projects. Everyone was very productive and it was fun seeing what everyone worked on.

Yanick gifted us each a cute sewist block and I made a little quilt to remember the weekend. The fabric surrounding the block was made using water soluble oil pastels and Inktense pencils. Kathryn showed us how to use them. Beth worked with the gold Kaufman fabric and gave me the selvage.

Alejandrina worked on a T-shirt quilt featuring the band Who. Marge whipped up a gorgeous table runner using the Porcelain Blue fabric. Cara and her sister worked on a cute Sesame Street quilt with a blue gingham backing and fun watermelon blocks. Joy loves purple, so there's a swatch of purple. I had everyone sign the back. I can't wait for the next retreat. My bags can be packed in 10 minutes.