Last weekend I attended the Central Jersey Modern Quilt Guild retreat at the Hyatt House in Bridgewater, New Jersey. There were about 15 women in attendance working on a variety of projects. I was the only person there without a sewing machine.
I decided to work on my Batik Flower Garden Quilt projects. I basted my quilting sample piece before the retreat, and I managed to do some quilting on it. Initially I had tried using both green and burgundy threads for the quilting using the pattern below. After doing a little of it I decided that you really couldn’t tell that two colors were being used. I think something like this would be better done with machine quilting which would emphasize the quilting stitches more.
So I tried doing some concentric circles around the crimson centers of the flowers. I decided that I liked the effect, and did quite a bit of quilting on this piece while at the retreat.
I spent most of my my time, however, creating burgundy flowers and adding them around the edge of the large batik flower garden quilt.
By the time I was done adding flowers I had added fifteen burgundy flowers around the border and the hunter green hexagons between them. They are at the porch level in the picture below.
Here is a better view of the new burgundy flowers.
And here is a nice close up of those burgundy flowers.
This retreat was my second opportunity to get to talk to some of the women in my quilt guild. The first opportunity was when we had a booth at the Pennington Farmer’s Market in October. I enjoyed chatting with the women as we all worked. I even showed Tatiana how to do English Paper Piecing. She was finishing up a very modern quilt based on a workshop she had attended. She thought that a few flowers scattered across the surface would enhance the overall appearance of the work. I am looking forward to seeing the finished quilt during the show and tell segment of a future guild meeting.
My primary motivation in attending the retreat was to get to know people in the guild. I found it really pleasant to be working along side a group of women. In order to make this social event pay off I decided that it was important to learn people’s names, but I know that I have a terrible time remembering names. I decided to admit my limitation openly, and ask people if I could take a picture and write down their names. That way I would have a chance of being able to remember them later because I could look at the photos and names to study a little bit.
By the time I left the retreat I was able to look at each person and say her name. I made only one mistake when I did that, which I thought was pretty good. I did warn them though that when I saw them next I might not remember the names because they wouldn’t be sitting in the same places. I am such a spacial person. If you gave me a floor plan of the room I could still write the names on the tables, but I’m not sure I could match the names up with the faces at this point.
Love the progress you are making. Can’t wait to see it in its continued evolution!
I have met so many wonderful quilters on retreats. They always inspire …and often become lifetime friends. Jessica, to name just one.
Wow I never would’ve thought of using concentric circles to quilt hexie flowers. Pretty interesting!
Karen, I wanted to make sure that any quilting I did could be done without marking the quilt in any way. The concentric circles allowed me to do that. All I needed to do was stitch from about 1/4 inch from the top of one seam to 1/4 inch down from the top of the next seam. Once I did the outer circle I just had to echo it for the remaining two in the set of three circles. Curving the tiny bits of quilting slightly was easy enough. I wanted to be able to eyeball the whole process, and I found that I could. I also wanted to do more quilting than was necessary to merely hold the layers together. What I am finding most interesting about the concentric circles is that the quilting really shows up on the solid brown and caramel flowers the most. The quilting shows up a bit less on the burgundy flowers, yet it almost disappears on the batik flowers. You really have to be right on top of the quilt to see the stitching on the burgundy flowers. By the way, I am using a new piece of thread for each set of concentric circles.
I love the circles! They are a bit unexpected but really add to the overall design.
I’ve never been on a retreat, but my local shop holds a weekly open sew, and I have the same issue with names. I recognize their faces and can recall all the conversations but their names. Nope. It’s really embarrassing. They all know me, but I tend to stand out due to my age and the fact I rarely bring a machine.
Keep up the fantastic work!
If you don’t think it is too late you could just announce at the next meeting that you have trouble with names and you want to improve and ask if you can go around taking pictures and writing down names. Of course, then you are kind of committed to trying to learn them. But I think people appreciate the effort even if you fail sometimes. I have a local sewing event coming up at a train station in January, so I will probably be studying my names before I go and adding new names because I am sure there will be people there who were not at the retreat. I was a teacher for 27 years and I depended on my seating charts. One year I decided to take pictures of all of my students and put them on the seating chart. It helped a little bit, but I was really too busy to study the names. I didn’t need to know who they were to grade their work, although some would say that’s not true I always maintained that the work stood on it’s own regardless of who created it.
Ooooh, I love the concentric circle quilting! Nice work.