San Francisco Quiltaway

Every two years, the San Francisco Quilt Guild sponsors "Quiltaway", a 3-day quilting retreat. I went for the first time this year. It's three days of intense sewing and quilting, culminating in "Sew and Tell" of all the projects! Activities are a mix of group projects, working on charity quilts, classes, silent auction and door prizes, and socializing.

I signed up for a 2-day class on making this paper-pieced quilt, a pattern designed by the teacher, Deb Karasik. She is a paper-piece guru who has patterns and techniques for making this type of quilt, with sharp points. This is HER quilt that the class was based on. We brought the fabrics we wanted to use for the quilt, and everyone in the class had a different take on it -

I decided to make it in a southwest-looking color scheme. I didn't get close to finishing the quilt top in the class, despite hours and hours of working on it! Here's what I got done:

I'm not sure the outer blocks really work, and I might re-do them with a slightly different color scheme. You can probably tell that my blocks are not even sewn together yet - I'm waiting to figure out the final arrangement.

Here are some of the other quilts that people made in the class. We had some real over-achievers in there - one woman stayed up til 2 AM one night to get her top put together!

Another thing I did was participate in a Mystery Quilt, which was fun. It involves following directions given one step at a time, not knowing what the final product will look like til it comes together in the end. Here's my quilt:
Otherwise, I made some charity preemie quilts, and I won 4 beautiful skeins of wool yarn in a drawing! We also had to make little 10-inch quilts to exchange as "souvenirs" of the quiltaway - I forgot to take a picture of mine!

Fun weekend - a luxury to be able to sew and quilt and not cook or keep house for the weekend!