"hi and bye!"

Hello everybody, I'm glad for you to see me, I guarantee!  I'm sayng "hi" because I've been MIA for a few days (but don't ask me what I was busy with, because I can't put my finger on one specific thing), and "bye" because I'll be on my retreat in Deep Creek until Sunday.  There are 16 of us and it's going to be fun, fun, fun!  If you'd like to take a look, here's our cabin.

I gave you sneak peeks of a project I was working on for awhile.  I think I can show you the entire thing now, since the retreat is starting today.  I combined two projects by using fabrics I received in the Brown Bag contest to make my retreat quilt; go here to see an explanation of the fabrics, the blocks I made, and the quilt's background, then we'll look at the quilt.

Since the theme of this year's retreat is "Sweet Treat," our assignment was to make a quilt, any size, showing sweet treats that we should not have anymore.  Because I can't do anything simple and I'm a glutton for punishment, here's my interpretation of the theme...

How busy is that??  I named it "Eat Cake and Diet!"  This gorgeous plus-sized lady stands next to a table with three of her favorite cakes, with an angel over her shoulder telling her to be good, and she's eating an apple to show she's "being good."  After she pigged out on cake, leaving a plateful of crumbs!  At the bottom left you see more encouragement: "a caveman can do it."  I made the border by combining strips in a random pattern; is that busy or am I crazy?  a-hem, never mind...

I drew the table and stool free-hand, also the wedge of chocolate cake.  Here's a closeup:

Remember these letters and blocks?

I used the letters to spell out the message, and I used some of the blocks in the border.  The rest of the blocks went into the back, which I showed you a few days ago:

For some reason, they just didn't want to be on the front!  Wouldn't play well with the theme I guess... kept asking "what's our motivation...?"  So I slammed their little butts on the back.  Mess with me will ya... whatever.

All in all, it's a "different" quilt for me and was fun to make, but I'll probably use it as a lap quilt ...  somehow I can't imagine that monster hanging on my walls!  I know I'll make other quilts like this one but I'd like to try lightening it up a bit, this one turned out kinda dark.

Well, that's it for now, I'll see you when I get back, sew forth and sew on...  my stupid chair just broke and almost pitched me on the floor.