Retreat Work

I had the pleasure of attending the Holly Girls quilt retreat last week. Pat Holly and Sue Nickels taught us the finer points of machine applique and border design.I packed my boxes of tiny scraps to work on and since the Red and White Quilts book arrived while I was packing, I threw in some red and white yardage. At first, I was busy piecing more tiny sixteen patches from the scraps. After a few lessons, demonstrations, and show and tell I was ready to start an applique project. This will be a strippy quilt inspired by Susan McCord's fabulous quilts. The strip on the right was my first design and uses a motif from the border of her Floral Urn quilt. The strip on the left is a two color version of her fabulous leaf vines that can be seen on several of her quilts.Pat told us that after stitching 100 skinny points and small circles we will have mastered the machine applique technique for points and circles. I think these two border strips will help me become a master at machine applique.I hope I can follow through and get these stitched down. I plan to design two more applique strips and set them alternately with solid red strips.