BRMQG Retreat -- my projects

Remember reading about the Baton Rouge MQG retreat at the River Retreat House over the July 4th weekend. In this post I highlighted some of the works my friends created. 

Finally, I get to tell you about the pieces I worked on. Admittedly, I played as much as I worked. So the end results won't be much, but nevertheless, here they are. 

I started with the Sugaridoo row that needed doing. I'd packed one basket just for that purpose. Honestly, I didn't like it but once I saw it with the rest of the quilt, I decided it fits right in. Of course I went with the improv option and then improv-ed more as I played. Sometimes I have three white strips, sometimes four. I did make one more to fill in that gap on the left, but for some reason, I didn't get a photo. Isn't the top looking good though? There will be separations between the rows. 

I brought a kit that I'd put together last year. It's as simple as a quilt can be: 8" blocks of various stripes and plaids. It took an afternoon of sewing to slam it together. Of course, I strip pieced it running two blocks through the machine like runner on steroids. I was grateful that the parts to my machine had come in and I had put them in place. Zoom! Zoom!

The plaid quilt was barely folded when I started another. This time I was working with lots of text fabric, some scraps and no one idea in mind. Naturally I kicked it into improv gear and let myself go. I got this far, having decided that I would include small pieces of green to break up the text chunks.

Then Glen decided to mess with me and threw in one of her blocks. I didn't even notice it, according to her, for quite a while. I was in the zone, man! But there was this nagging that something was needed. Boom! I'm not telling her but it think it's that tiny corner of teal that gave me the idea.

As luck would have it, I had a large scrap of teal that looks like it has strips of newspaper on it. Could it be more perfect?

So into the quilt wide chunks went. And basically, I built a chunk and found a spot for it. There was no rhyme or reason. Occasionally I'd look at the whole piece through the camera to get a clearer perspective, but mostly it was simple. 

In the end, I had three long pieces that fit together quite easily. But I do not like that line right down the center. Something will have to be done about that before it can be quilted. I have a few ideas and am open to suggestions. Please share them if you can think of something, anything.