October Eve Report on Merricks Progress (and a New Project!)

My weekend retreat without my Bernina was very, very nice. While the retreat was scheduled from Thursday afternoon until Monday morning, that was longer than I wished to be away, so I came home very early on Sunday morning.

This is the central medallion of Merricks and the first thing I did was applique it onto the background squares. I don't really enjoy applique other than blanket stitch (more about which in a minute), but this went together smoothly. The color is a bit off in this photograph in that the cross piece that appears to be black is actually purple.

Next came the 21 pairs of leaves of various greens that surround the central medallion. This took many, many hours of blanket stitching and because I've never become comfortable using a thimble, it was hard on my fingers.

But it's done. There is another row of applique to happen once my fingers feel better; that will be approximately two inches beyond the leaves and is 1" wide strips of various sizes and fabrics. They are all cut out and ready to go.

I have a blog friend in western Canada who started Merricks when I did and we had a wonderful time consulting whilst picking out our focus fabrics. I'm a little further along on my project than my friend is but during this year she's been off to Europe at least once and gone camping and -- well, oh my -- does the woman ever stay home and sew? Anyway, we decided a while back to swap pieces of our focus fabric and include each other's choice in our quilt. So one of my strips will be this beautiful, rich gold color that should go beautifully with my other choices.

The retreat house was spacious with a view of a massive cornfield. We all kept expecting the ball players -- you know the ones -- from "if you build it, they will come" to emerge! There were nine of us, good cooks with funny stories, excellent and generous quilters, and I had a wonderful time.

I've begun work on another project, a twin size quilt for a delightful young woman who will be aging out of the Special Education system in another year, so a celebration quilt will be needed.

She's very bright and exceptionally chatty; loves red and patterns and details, so figuring out what to make for her was very easy. I'm four blocks in at this point and having a very good time making them. So different from the struggles with Merricks. You can see that some of the blocks -- about 20 of them -- will have embroidered centers and the rest will have centers that match the rest of the sawtooth. A half dozen or so of the embroideries are complete and it was challenging to get them to hold still in the hoop. So I took the rest of the stamped designs and cut them to size and made the blocks before doing the embroidery. I like them a lot and believe the recipient will like them even more!