BIQR 2009 Report

The weather started out cold, windy, and rainy, but that blew away and the next day was beautiful. The leaves in northern Michigan were turning colour and squirrels were collecting acorns for the winter...these squirrels were quite literate and left us this note ;)....

The retreat started off with Gwen's wonderful trunk show, she was raring to go despite this being the 5th time in the past month to give this show! What a wonderful lady!

Christine and Bonnie both had a turn at helping Gwen show off her quilts. It was amazing to see up close some of the quilts we've only seen in her books, like this antique Whig Rose from 1900:

Gwen told us that she once read, that your applique should be in scale with your blocks...well she thought, I don't think so... and Gwenny's Little Bitsy Nine Patch was born.

She reminded us that the old quiltmakers didn't have patterns to follow they just designed their quilts themselves. All your tulips don't have to be exact, and if you run out of a fabric you can use something else. That is why no two antique quilts are alike, they are similar but not exact copies. There are some basic formats you can follow, such as four-block applique, or medallion quilts with the applique in the centre.

Each day Gwen treated us to her mini demos. If you wanted to learn one of her techniques she was on hand to give it to you. She taught her serpentine borders, how to cut out flower templates from folded paper, how to make yo-yos, how to draw feather quilting patterns, to name a few. This year she had a quilt frame set up for hand-quilting demos.

She had plenty of her books on sale, I think she sold out of her Classic Four-Block Applique Quilts book. I used my copy as a yearbook and had all the participants sign it as a keepsake. It is an excellent book for applique!

Christine and I were a little more relaxed this year and we headed out to explore the Michigan countryside and visit quilt stores. We visited The Quilt Cottage in East Jordan, Cousins Quilt Shop in Bellaire, Rene's Quilt Shop in Williamsburg, Now and Then in Elk Rapids, and the Quilting Bee in Traverse City.

We were lucky to have 3 visitors from the Netherlands during our week. Lucy from Haarlem (Quilting from the Past), Joes (Dutch Quilt Cat) and Isabeau from Amsterdam. All 3 of them have been featured in Quilt Mania, a quilting magazine from France. They agreed to give us a talk about Dutch quiltmaking and fabrics from Holland. They knew so much! It was fabulous, a dutch treat!

Below, you can see Lucy holding my Echt Hollands quilt and my Cathedral windows pillow as examples of fabric from Holland. The fabric I used, my cousin bought for me at the store that Lucy works at(!)

Bonnie Hunter from Quiltville, best friends with Lucy, was also there. It was very exciting to meet such an amazing lady! That lady never quits! She had been on the road for weeks before driving up to Elk Rapids. You can read about her experiences at BIQR already on her blog.


Last but not least, here is what I accomplished at the retreat. On the right is the applique I was working on. The applique is not finished, some of the pieces are still just pinned on...I am planning to add some borders, but I don't know what yet. I made 3 little appliqued postcards. I like to make postcards at the retreat and send them from Elk Rapids as surprises. And the final piece on the left is my floor scrap quilt. Every year Gwen tells everyone to just throw your scraps onto the floor and let everybody go "shopping". The centre piece I created and the colourful strips on the borders are all found scraps, I did add the solid purple and black as borders from my stash.

Most of my scraps were from Sue, who was sitting behind me! She was doing this amazing applique where she had fussy cut all these berries and there were some on the floor and I was happy to include them in my piece as flowers or are they just wacky lolipops, I'm not sure!

On Sunday, we woke up to snowflakes! brrrrrrrrr! and it was Good-bye!


In the next few weeks, I will try and put up a few photos of some of the other amazing projects that were being worked on at the retreat.