It's all British all the time here lately.

It seems to be Anglophile mania here lately. I got my fabulous Cath Kidston products last week, and tomorrow, at a ridiculously early hour of the morning, is The Royal Wedding! Yes, I'm totally one of those dorks that's completely into it.

I'm of the age when we all remember getting up obscenely early to watch Diana and Charles get married. It seems fitting to watch her son do the same.

I don't really care what Kate and William do on a daily basis, and think the press should stay out of it and let them live their lives, but boy do I love a good wedding. And a Royal Wedding is a whole stratosphere above your average wedding in fabulousness.

Yes, there are terrible things going on all over the world, as there are every day of every year, but you have to let that go and enjoy some pomp and circumstance every now and then or you'd be totally depressed all the time.

Ashley, her hubby, and their dog are coming tonight to have a sleep over so we can get up at 4am to watch it together. My hubby said to not bother waking him up for it. I told him he's a big pooper.

Ashley has secured tiaras for us to wear with our jammies, which totally rocks. I have scones, devonshire cream, lemon curd, crumpets, chocolate croissants, Prosecco w/peaches and fresh strawberries and Harney & Sons Royal Wedding Tea, which will be served in my Liberty of London teapot and matching cups. We are doing this thing up right.

Then at 9am, I will be picking up PittiPat and we will be heading off for our annual Spring quilting retreat at Evergreen in Janesville! I can't wait. I have the projects all packed. Needless to say there are waaaayyyy too many of them. I have the makings for 10 bags and 3 quilts (one of which is the Strawberry Fields quilt) packed. We all tend to bring too many projects. Do you think we have delusions of grandeur? PittiPat asks that every retreat, but I like to think that we are just optimistic.

All of those bags are projects, except the wheely one, which contains my beloved Janome 6500.

Retreating

I had my bi-annual girlfriends quilting retreat the first weekend of November up at Evergreen Retreat in Janesville, Wisconsin. We all had such a good time, we probably each gained about 5 lbs in 3 days!  Evergreen is really a fantastic retreat location. It's reasonable priced, not that far from where we live, they provide all the 'stuff' for quilting (irons/big boards, tall cutting tables, rulers, ott lights, design walls, comfy chairs.....) and they have 3 nearby quilt shops to explore! I felt that I got quite a bit done, so that was a bonus.
I made pillowcases out of Riley Blake's "Colorful Christmas" line  for DiscoJen's kids for Christmas.

I finished sewing on the binding on the 'Plaid About You' quilt out of Lakehouse's 'Fun Flowers' black colorway. And since Binding Guru Karen was at the retreat, I even got it hand tacked down in record time. I tell you, the woman is a binding genius!

I used my water-soluble interfacing technique to mark my quilting.

I quilted the big flowers free-hand. Just to be clear, this is a panel. I did not applique these fabulous flowers.

And since this is for a baby, I used bright, lime green minky on the back. This photo doesn't portray the color accurately, it's really a lime green, like the gingham in the flower above. I love how the quilting shows up on minky.

I designed and tried to figure out how to make a commissioned tree skirt from my extremely crudely drawn design. I specifically save this to do at the retreat since I would have others to help me figure out how the heck to put this thing together. My friend Carol is especially helpful with these types of things because she's an engineer.
I started with this pile of batiks and fairy frost:

I made a circle out of the beyond fantastic red diamond Hoffman Batik. I found a ton of tutorials online on how to do this. I then used my beloved 1/4" fusible web tape and ironed under the edge.

Then I pieced together the greens into large strip sets and interspersed some thin. white fairy frost strips here and there and used one of those 9degree rulers to make wedges. I had the idea that if I could get the angles right on a quarter of the circle, then I could just do 4 of those and connect them, but unfortunately it isn't that easy. I had to make some wider angled strips, some smaller wedged strips and so on. I'm not done with it yet, but I have a good start at least. I'm really pleased with how it's turning out too.

And last, but certainly not least, I FINALLY finished the last of my Hydrangea commissioned "You Go Girl" bags!!!! It feels soooooo good to get this thing done. It wouldn't be that bad, but I quilted the crap out of the material. It took me 10-12 hours just to quilt the material, and this is the 3rd bag I've made like this! I'm really over quilting the hydrangea material!



Seriously, what was I thinking when I started to quilt it this way?!?!?!

I have photos of what everyone else made, but I can't locate the SD card with them on it, so that will have to be another post!