Thursday, May 1, 2025

Guild Retreat 2025


My guild - Triangle MQG - tried something new last weekend - a 'sleep in your own bed retreat'. In the past, we rented a room at a hotel at the beach about a 2 hr drive away. This year, we rented a large space associated with a fabric store and held our retreat there. (That's me standing up on the bottom right.)

Everything went so well - even with a 90 minute power outage after a large storm blew through! We had pizza Friday night, ice cream Saturday afternoon and plenty of junk food all the rest of the time!


My goal for the weekend was to get 63 double wedding ring blocks pieced. Turns out, this was far too optimistic - isn't that always the way with retreat sewing? Instead of 63 complete blocks, I managed to sew 39 partial blocks - leaving the last seam which required some accuracy to line up seams for home.


It took awhile to get in the grove but one I started laying out the block pieces for a row ahead of time I was able to speed up the process. That said, I got too confident towards the end and started piecing the blocks without pinning. That just meant there were some misaligned blocks to fix when I got home!

In addition to the blocks, I finished the last bits of my tchotchke block requested by bee mate @feltlikesweets - read more.


 Besides the sewing, there was much laughter and new friendships formed. And, as I said, there was ice cream!



Have a wonderful day! Patty

2 comments:

  1. There's nothing like getting to sleep in your own bed, is there? It sounds like a great way to have a retreat! Do you think it was successful enough to be repeated or alternated every other year versus traveling to the beach?

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  2. Around here, such a retreat is called a Sleep at Home retreat, or a Commuter Retreat. Either way, I've never been on one, though our MQG chapter is planning it's first one for November. Curious... what were the hours of your retreat? And how long did it take you to drive to/from the venue? Our retreat will be from 9AM to 4PM three days in a row, and each way the drive takes 40-45 minutes. I'm not sure I want to make that travel time commitment for only seven hours of sewing. In any case, it looks like you had a big response to this kind of retreat. The food sure sounds good!

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