Ahhhhh….retreat weekend….and I got so much done!  No, really!

I arrived at retreat on Friday morning with everything except the outer sashing cut for The Pink One’s mermaid quilt.  I blogged about the finish here.  Yes, I said FINISH!  Yee Haw!

Saturday I pressed and cut 17 or so FQs and lots of yardage of Twice as Nice by Riley Blake Designs that I picked this up over the summer at Millie P’s in Anoka, MN.  (LOVE that shop!)  I knew I wanted to do something with big blocks to showcase the red trucks – they’re the best part of the fabric. After an exhaustive Pinterest search (yeah, right), I found a great tutorial by Amy at Diary of a Quilter for a Fast Four Patch. When I showed it to Gretchen, she said ‘that will be quick’, and I agreed.  Well, it wasn’t super duper quick, but I did manage to get most of my 4-patches sewn together on Saturday night and all of my strips sewn together today before I left the retreat.  I even managed to get two rows sewn together tonight while the kids were showering tonight.

This is going to be another big quilt!  I adjusted the layout from Amy’s tute to fit the # of FQs and yardage I had.  This is 11×11 blocks square – will be 88×88 when finished. I was kind of thinking I might add a 2″ border, but I’m not 100% sure about that right now.  I do like a border to pull everything together and frame it nicely.

Seriously…how stinkin’ cute is this fabric???  Gah!  I can’t stand it, I love it so much!  The ladies at the retreat kept asking who it was for.  ME!  Duh!

And that brings me to the subject of the blog post – Retreat Fabric.  I wasn’t going to do it, I swear.  I even told my husband there was nothing I wanted/needed. I looked at the fabric the LQS took to the retread and I didn’t see anything I had to have. I honestly thought I was going to leave without buying any, and that would be a first for me.  But on Saturday night after they put a portion of the fabric on sale for 50% off, Gretchen decided it was time to spend my money.  (I call her ‘The Enabler’…she has no problem shopping with my money!) Here’s what Gretchen picked out for me:

Pearl Bracelets for the back of my ‘Bloom Bloom Pow’ WIP quilt, and these super fun astronauts that glow in the dark!  I have 6 yards of Pearl Bracelets and 7.25 of the astronauts.  Gretchen insisted that one of us buy the astronauts – she had used them as the back of a super cute baby quilt. I totally stole this pic from her Flickr stream!  🙂 Here’s her front, and she used the glow in the dark astronauts on the back.

I have no clue what I’ll do with the astronauts – they may live in my stash for quite a while, but they were a good deal at 50% off and I’m in no hurry to use them.

I can’t believe that I finished a top and have another almost complete after the retreat.  That’s never happened to me before! I finished two quilts total in 2014, and so far in 2015 I have one completely finished, one that needs a binding, and three tops done (two are awaiting borders).  How’s that for improvement from year-to-year?

And because I didn’t do it at the retreat at all, I’m hanging out here, cruising the blogs, and drinking my wine.  I can’t believe that for the 2nd year in a row I brought home a full bottle of wine!  That’s so unlike me!

It’s Sunday Stash Day, so I’m linking up to Molli!