Retreat Preparation

One more work week until my guild's retreat! This retreat is extra special to me because I'm going to meet a long time internet friend in person for the first time. I met Ann-Sewsalot playing internet games, on Pogo. We've tried to think back, but can't remember if we first met in one of the Solitaire games or in Poppit (a strategy game where you pop matching sets of balloons till there's -hopefully- no balloons left) and we also can't remember exactly how long it's been. Our best guesstimate is 4 to 5 years ago.

Ann first talked me into getting EQ5, and was there for me when I was constantly asking questions about how-do-I-get-it-to ... ? She pushed me to enter the EQ monthly virtual design challenges and we had a lot of fun sending blocks and ideas back and forth. I found out her neighbor M. is a long-arm quilter, and that's where I send all my bed size quilts to be done. Last year, after our November retreat, Ann started talking about how fun it'd be if she came to the retreat, sometime... so this year Ann and M. joined my guild, long distance, then registered for the retreat a couple of months ago... now we're down to the wire - just a few days left to go!

M. is going to be driving down to Tennessee with Ann this Friday, (deer hunting season begins Friday also, their husbands will both be busy) and I'll get to meet them for the first time face to face! I'm so excited! As long as I've been online, I've never met anyone 'for real' that I first met virtually. I'm such a wimp. What if they hate me on sight? What if our personalities clash? What if I find out that Ann not only quilts beautifully but also ... spits tobacco, or some other weird habit we've just never talked about during our hours and years of chatting? :D

Anyway, all nervousness aside, here's what I worked on this weekend. Our guild does a challenge block as part of the retreat. They pass out an 8" square of fabric, and we're all challenged to make a block using at least a square inch of that fabric. Here's what I came up with:



The challenge fabric was the light khaki color that I used as a background. They let us buy additional squares of it for 25¢ if we needed to, and I did! I'd picked three different colors of blue to use, and ended up using this shade beacuse it more closely matches the little bit of blue in the challenge fabric. Now I wish I'd used the darker blue for more contrast, but... too late now! It still needs to be pressed one more time. The block is called 'Children Take Wing' and it's from Quilter's Cache. I redrew it in EQ because I wanted that center square to be one piece, not 4 triangles. My version goes together like a square-in-a-square, her version was a 4-patch.

Now I'm pre-cutting squares for the Friday night class we're taking. More on that later!