This past weekend, I once again headed up north for a quilting retreat with some of my friends from work. Like last year, I didn’t get out of the office as early as I’d hoped on Friday, but unlike last year, I hadn’t signed up to make dinner that night, so I wasn’t stressed about when I’d get there. Between my ski trip early in February and Weetacon late in February and catching up at work and home in between, I hadn’t been able to spend any time getting a project ready to work on at the retreat, so I just took my old standby, the paper pieced scrap blocks. Friday night after eating the dinner the ladies had kept warm for me, I was happily sitting at my sewing machine, sorting through bags of scraps and turning them into quilt blocks.

Saturday some of the ladies went out to a couple quilt shops in the area, but I stayed back at the retreat house, taking sewing breaks to page through books and magazines for inspiration for future projects. A theme started to emerge in the blocks I was making. One of the bags of scraps I’d brought was a set of fabrics I’d gotten in a swap with a Flickr friend, and there were a lot of cat prints in there, and I had a few Christmas fabric scraps I’d picked up at earlier retreats that seemed to coordinate nicely with some of the cat fabrics, and one woman this year was working on a brown/green project and giving me strips from that. It all combined into a theme I’m calling Country Cats Christmas, and once I noticed it, I started looking for scraps that fit the theme and making blocks accordingly. I only got about a half dozen done after that point, but perhaps some I’ve already got will fit in. I can see curling up under this quilt out at the condo in Idaho. Someday.

On my way home Sunday afternoon, I took a quick detour to Tawas Point State Park to look at the lighthouse there, and made a couple other stops to look out over frozen Tawas Bay (it was hard to get close in most places due to all the snow piles and drifts everywhere).

It felt good to play with fabric and sew again; I need to find a way to fit more of that in my regular life.

Photoset from the weekend is here.