Home Again

I am back home again! I had a wonderful time at the retreat. Susan Cleveland the author of Piping Hot Binding, Piping Hot Curves and Marvelous Miters was the guest speaker and one of the many quilting teachers there at the retreat. I took four classes with Susan and I am so happy that I did. She is a fantastic speaker/teacher. One of the classes I took with her was the Marvelous Miter class. I am a poor miter maker to say the least. In fact, I hated to make them. I decided that I should take the class because I am such a poor miter maker. Let me say I love her method! The thought of miters no longer make me shudder. This is the mitered block I made in that class and the block I made in the Piping Hot Curves class.
The art of making and applying piping isn't hard once you know the tricks. Susan is very generous in the sharing of her knowledge. I am planning on having fun with that curved piping technique.

On Friday night Susan gave a lecture. She showed many of the quilts from her books as well as some of her award winning quilts. We were able to see "up close" because of the use of a camera. That made it so much easier to see exactly what she was talking about when she referred to different areas of her quilts.
She also used the camera during her classes which made the many little details easy to understand.
There were many little quilts to look at and learn from. Susan pays quite a bit of attention to the little details, and that is what makes her work stunning.
Susan had her books and a couple of other helpful products available. Yep, I think I bought most of them. Yikes!
There were quite a few vendors at the retreat also. Look what I found! I think I bought two fat quarters for the usual $2.50 each, but the rest of the yardage was for $4.00 a yard. I didn't buy all that I would have liked, but I did find enough to make me happy.
See the four fat quarters on the right hand side? I won those in a door prize drawing. Fun!

Now the next photo will be understood by the city gals like me. When I pulled up in the parking lot at the college where the retreat was being held in Mt. Carmel, IL I looked over to the next street. There were fields of growing corn. What surprised me was that I was still in the town limits. See the stop sign and the 35 mph sign? Where I live you have to drive at least 25 - 30 min. away to see the first sign of crops growing in a field. By the time you see corn fields the speed limit is at least 55 mph. I'm not making fun of this by any means. I just think of it as small town charm!