Three crazy days

Last weekend was our guild retreat.  Wow.  It was so busy and exciting and fun and amazing and exhausting that two days later I am still processing it all.  

I worked on:

• Table runners:  Much progress was made.  One more strip will finish this quilt top 
• Art portfolio:  Done!
• Picnic quilt binding:  I hand-stitched one section of binding every morning and every time I switched projects, and then finished the last two sections after I got home.  It turned out soooo cute!
• Skirt to match Alabama shirt:   Done!  I drafted an a-line skirt from the instructions in Sew What! Skirts.

But I didn't get to: 

• Echo challenge
• Bed Quilt
• Ginni's sampler
• Pastille shirt

There were loooong hours of sewing at the retreat and I felt like I wasn't getting a lot done but I guess I actually did.  I brought enough stuff to keep me busy for three weeks, so if I finished half of the projects that means I got a week and a half of work done, right?  I did take a break on Saturday morning for a group trip to Harts in Santa Cruz (since it's only 30 minutes where we had the retreat but more like an hour from my house).   I spent more there than I had hoped, but I loooove the fabrics I got. 

That brings me to a New Year's resolution update: 

UFO reducing:  After finishing the Alabama top and the picnic quilt, my total UFO reduction score is now FOUR out of five.  Woot!!  I will be taking a break from busting the old projects because I have a guild challenge and a swap both needing to be finished next month. 

Fabric buying:  Eek.  Between the Harts trip and Julie having her shop (The Intrepid Thread) open at the retreat, well, I binged.  With the yardage for all the projects that I finished at the retreat, I'm oooonly at negative 1.75 yards, but I really wasn't supposed to go negative at all.  I'm gonna have to finish up a big quilt to get myself back on track.

Clothes sewing:  So far this year I finished the Taffy Blouse, the Alabama Shirt, and a tan a-line skirt.  I have a Pastille in progress as well, so I will count that as 3.5/6.  Lookin' good.

I tally my total sewing hours from the retreat at a whopping 23 hours.  I loved all the projects that I saw there, and I was really impressed by how much charity sewing people did.  It was really amazing!  I need to know when the next retreat will be so that I can start counting down the days.