Sewtopia Prep

Hi there!  It has been a busy few weeks.  I will have to travel back in time to fill in all the fabric and fun leading up to and during Sewtopia Palm Springs.  I previously showed all the fabrics for the first of three projects I planned to work on during the retreat, which was the Sidewalk Chalk pattern by Meghan Buchanan.  Cutting was a little stressful given that I was using color groups rather than single fabrics, but I was so happy to pull from stash. 

Blue fabrics are limited in my stash, but I found a good mix of print, scale, and tone. 

This late night pic of the greens turned one of them brown. 

Reds, yellows and peaches rounded out the groupings. I prewashed all the pieces to prevent running colors...look at the sink with the reds!

It required a number of rounds of soaking and rinsing before the water was clear. 

I also did a lot of cutting and sewing for a secret birthday gift for my sister, as her birthday fell during Sewtopia. 

Kathy loves blues so I put those in the middle.  Most of the pieces were cut from 5" charm squares. I used two different white on white prints for fun. The pattern I bought from a speaker at guild a few years ago. 

As you can see, I chose to do only one row and make a tablerunner size of the Mini Spikey pattern. While I got the binding sewn on by machine, I had to finish hand-sewing it down while at Sewtopia. The border and binding are Kona Navy, which is near black, it is so dark!

I participated in the general Sewtopia blind swap; I made this reuseable gift bag and filled it with a few fat quarters, a pattern, and other goodies. This is about 9" tall in real life.  I put it in another gift bag and added a notebook sized graph paper book as well. 

We were able to be less choosy about how much to bring to Sewtopia  since we were driving;  I brought my own sewing machine.  The drive was not short, but everything went pretty smoothly through LA and we got to the Margaritaville Resort in good time.  As we walked into the lobby, our brother was at the desk checking in his wife!  Too funny.  This was Laura's first Sewtopia, and she brought her  brand new machine, a fancy Quilter's Edition Bernina.  More about that later....

Our 3rd floor room overlooked the pool...

I caught a UFO cloud near sunset :)  It was nice to be settled into the hotel before the big event started the next day. More about that in the next post!