Patoka Valley Quilt Guild Winter Retreat 2013

Each year, the Patoka Valley Quilt Guild has a Winter Retreat at Spring Mill. This year we had a great crowd.

The room setup was fabulous. We each had our own big table. There were extra tables for cutting and ironing. (Two people even brought their Big Boards for others to use.) We also had a snack table with all kinds of homemade and purchased goodies to share. Here are a few pics of our workspaces. (Some are neater than others!)

There were machines of every type--see the little Featherweight at the back left of this picture?

Most quilters are VERY prepared for a retreat--notice the trash bags taped to the tables, lights, Kleenex boxes, personal irons, tilt machine tables, and (of course) cell phones.

You can see my latest black and white project in this picture at the bottom left. I had just started the hand beading which ended up taking a full three days!

Lots of beautiful work was done. I took pictures of a SMALL sampling. Check these out...

Robin Walston made a scrappy quilt. (I don't think she made a dent in her stash, though!)

Sandy Russell made a quilt with colors I LOVE!

Sherri Hilgeman made a colorful quilt with batiks. (Sorry it is a little blurry.)

Some people pinned their projects to a back wall. I got some pics, but I'm not sure who made each one. (If I give the wrong person credit or miss someone, I apologize.)

I DO know that Marge Hevron did this one. She said her kids told her she needed to make more "modern" quilts. They should be pleased with this one.

Jane Heichelbech made this "jelly roll" quilt top. She said she wanted to see how it would look if she cut the strip ends on the diagonal.

The quilt top on the left also belongs to Jane Heichelbech; the one on the right belongs to Jane Horney.

Donna Vieke made this quilt (on the left). It is a finished quilt made using a Quilt-As-You-Go method to finish it. Robin Walston has a table runner on the right.

I'm not sure who made the little quilt top in front or the swirl table runner on the left, but the quilt top on the right was made by Darlene McNelis.

 

I wish I had taken more pictures, but I got caught up in just gawking at all the quilty goodness at the retreat.

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Quilt As You Go

Way back in the day, I tried making a quilt-as-you-go (QAYG) quilt. It made the quilting easier, but made everything else more difficult. I also didn't like the ridges that were made when joining the blocks together. At that time, it just wasn't something I wanted to do again.

I have discovered a blog that shows QAYG. The blogger actually makes it look doable--almost painless. I studied her tutorials and decided to try it out on a table runner. I cut Warm and Natural batting to 15 inches square and used the flip-and-sew method to make the block. (She doesn't do the final quilting at this step because of the stop-and-start nature of flip and sew. It just isn't very neat.) Once the block was finished, I added a backing and did the machine quilting. I used her method of joining the blocks with skinny strips, which makes the join almost imperceptible. I found it to be very easy to do.

I'm pleased with the results. I think the one on the left will make a good autumn table runner. Of course, the one on the right is for the Fourth of July.

I quilted this one with vertical lines in navy and random crossing lines in red.

I quilted this one in a grid-type pattern.

This was a really fun and fast project to do. I didn't use a ruler to cut my pieces (but you could); it was very freeing to do. If you would like to check out the QAYG technique, check out The Quilting Edge blog tutorials.

 

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Ice Dyeing

I finally had a chance to do some ice dyeing. I wanted to experiment a bit by starting with DRY soda ash soaked fabric. I have seen what beginning with wet fabric looks like and wanted to see what would happen if I tried it with dry fabric. I covered my fabrics with ice sprinkled with dye powder.

Here are two of the fabrics before dyeing. The piece on the left is a "wipe-up" rag. The fabric on the right is an OLD calico fabric that I really hated. I thought any kind of dyeing would help it.

Here is what they looked like after ice dyeing.

These are some commercial fabrics I wanted to experiment with.

After dyeing...

This is a flour-paste resist piece before dyeing.

This is after dyeing. I used fire engine red, rust orange, and bronze dyes.

Another piece of flour-paste resist before...

and after... I used rust, bronze, pumpkin spice, and golden yellow dyes for this one.

This is the only "plain" piece I dyed. It was just a plain white to start with.

If you'd like to see my set up for ice dyeing and find out why I didn't get that "crystal-like" effect that usually occurs with ice dyeing, check out my post on the Fire blog.

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Ice Dyeing

Over on the Fire blog (www.andthenwesetitonfire.blogspot.com) we are concentrating on scrunch dyeing fabrics. Several of the resident artists are scrunching the fabric and snow dyeing it. I really like the unpredictable results I get when snow dyeing, so I decided to do some too.

Unlike my friends out East, I didn't have enough snow for snow dyeing. My friend Irene sent me this picture. She had about 30 inches of snow.

I had to use a big bag of ice I purchased this afternoon. I put some of my soda-soaked fabrics on a grid, covered them with ice, and sprinkled on some dye powder. I put other pieces in the bottom of a bowl, covered them with ice, and sprinkled different dye powder on them. Now I wait. I'll be rinsing them and revealing the "new" fabrics tomorrow afternoon.

Check out the scrunched and snow dyed fabrics of the resident artists on the Fire blog. They have even shown some examples of how to use the fabrics. (I have trouble cutting into mine!)