PTA RETREAT QUILTS

Our 4th annual PTA retreat is now a happy memory and the count down for our 2013 - 5th anniversary event is on....

 We are so lucky to have such a great facility close by! Three of us have gotten in the habit of working in a pod....often doing the similiar projects and sharing fabric.  Here Kate is hard at work.

 I had cut piles and piles of black and white rectangles (2 1/2" x 4 1'2")....a gift from my good friend Helen who was reducing her stash.  Kate brought the colored fabrics which we cut into 2 1/2" squares.  Our goal this retreat was to make several donation quilts.


Here are the rows I stitched for my first quilt. 

 .......and chain stitching the patches for my 2nd. quilt.

 Judy was doing the same......and yikes......she'd been sewing and sewing..... pressing along the way.  Then....... incredibly she noticed some odd looking seam lines.  


It sort of looked like the thread's black dye had run.  Strangely, the thread seemed brittle......and when testing the seam.....she found it had come completely apart.....  

 ....yet in other places the stitching was normal......

 We finally determined the thread was melting during the pressing process. This is totally weird since it only happened in some sections on Judy's quilt.  At first we thought the iron was too hot, yet it didn't melt my Aurfil thread.  The only thing we can conclude is that perhaps this thread was defective.  Grrrr....Judy spent a LOT of time removing hard bits of thread and resewing many, many seams.

 Here is Kate's quilt....and her creative backing....

 Our three quilts finished before lunch on day 2.....

.....and my 2nd quilt (left) completed just after lunch, day 3.  Kate had begun the scrappy quilt on the right previously, but with Judy's help....that too was completed before we departed today.


Okay......so now that I shared the 'work'.......stay tuned for the 'play'.