Musings From a Weekend Retreat with the SA Mod Quilt Guild

I've been in love with quilt making of one sort or another for, well, a very long time.  I grew up watching my paternal grandmother, a seamstress in a small Kansas town, piece, then quilt by hand on a frame, all sorts of quilts.  I fell in love with quilting when re-acquainted with it by Edith York, a nurse-colleague of mine in the labor and delivery unit where I used to work.  I fell in love again when I started creating things of my own design, and when I learned how to dye and print my own textiles it was icing on the cake.  All this spans over (ahem) quite a few years.  I took it up myself in the early 80s.
I had never gone on a quilting retreat until I fell in step with the San Antonio Modern Quilt guild.  Now I have been on three!  The latest was this past weekend at a place called the Deep Woods Retreat Center, near Smithville Texas.   It is really sort of perfect:  nice sleeping quarters right off the work-area, and a dining room on the opposite side of the work area from the sleeping quarters.  It has a covered loading area to move all the stuff in and out of vehicles without risking the weather.  Not that we get much rain.
I drove up on Thursday afternoon, set up my machine, and got down to it.  Here are some images from the weekend.

Everyone had a lot of design wall space because there were only 16 of us.

It was great!  I had 3 4x8 sections, and managed to take over 3 more.

 I made the rounds and looked at everyone's pincushions.  Here are a few:

this just makes me laugh.

I purchased a set of Marcia Derse fat quarters in Long Beach and 

I wanted to create something paired with Kaffe Fassett shot cotton solids....

This is as far as I could get since I ran out of the dark charcoal solid.

It will have a narrow, then wide border in the gray with some additional 3.5 inch squares 

sprinkled in.

It makes me think of a birds-eye view of a cityscape:  the rooftop elements.

I became reacquainted with how to set in corners.  The right half is much more reasonably 

organized than the left, which is kluged together.  Lots of right angle corner sets.  Ugh.

I'll tidy it all up later....

Then I pulled out and added to these blocks.

My friend Kim played around with the swatches in the center of each block.

I need to add that this was happening about 3 am.

I'm thinking of adding circular elements in some or all of the central squares.

What do you think?  Add something, or leave them as is?

Here it is, completely joined.  It is big!

These 2 tops took most of 3 days.  It was a wonderful time!

You know me and circular stuff...I had to snap this stacked wood: