Monday, October 21, 2019

Sew Me St. Louis 2019

The 2019 STLMQG retreat was a great success. I had so much fun I forgot to take many pictures.

There were about 100 attendees. We had a huge ballroom and lots of table space - each person had their own whole table. I happened to be in one of the corners - it was a great location with power outlets nearby and convenient to the ironing stations in the breakout room across the hall. In the photo below, the chair in the lower right is at the edge of my "pod."

I took way more projects than I could possibly get done. I got the #1 priority done, the baby quilt for my niece's baby girl due in November. I also got the triangle project finished to a flimsy. Here it is in rows on the "wall."

This project was started at Sew Me in 2017 - I had recently gotten a die cutter and I cut all those triangles from stash and assembled the HSTs at retreat. After laying them out at home and labeling the rows and columns, I started assembling the rows at last year's retreat. This year I finished the top. I'll try to get a photo for Friday's post.

I thoroughly enjoyed being with my pod-mates. We had some great conversation and enjoyed each other's company. Left to right: me, Judy, Nancy, and Sara. Judy got three baby quilt tops pieced for Project Linus and made progress on a Halloween quilt. Nancy got a Halloween top finished, a long time UFO, and got more than 100 log cabin blocks pieced as far as you see here. That's a lot of logs and a lot of piecing! Sara tried paper piecing for the first time and succeeded masterfully. She also whipped out a Sew Together bag, her first.

Over the course of three days everyone was able to circulate and check out what all the others were making. Such a huge variety of projects! By day three, several people were laying blocks out on the floor in the hall and assembling tops. Some amazing projects were shared each evening at Show and Tell.

The scrap scramble was much less chaotic this year because it was held in the breakout room with the scraps on tables instead of on the floor. I contributed a stuffed gallon baggie but, by plan, I selected only a few pieces to bring home with me. I really don't need more scraps, but some of them were very appealing.

I think my demo about using glue basting for machine finished binding went well. Here's a link to an earlier post about how I do it. 

Many thanks to the Sew Me organizing committee for putting on a great event! It was lots of fun and I'm already looking forward to next year.

1 comment:

  1. Wow! Looks like you had a great retreat. Was it a sleep over style or did you come in from home each day? I haven't seen many retreats that can accommodate 100 people. I always take too much to retreats because it's nice to have extras in case you get tired of one of the projects. It looks like you all had a great time and got a lot done.

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