Ice Cream "Sew"cial

This is a quilt top to be given to an injured Montana soldier. Our quilt group, the Cross Country Piece Makers, are giving these quilts to our injured Montana soldiers. It is one of our projects. One of our members quilts them on her long-arm machine as her donation. Someone else binds them and puts on a label. They are lap quilt size and we have donated about 35-40 so far. Of all the things we have done, this is very special.


This is our yearly quilt retreat and this year we went to Colstrip. We stopped in Forsyth and shopped at the fabric store there (that is soon to close). The Ace Hardware store in Colstrip has a wonderful fabric section and we left a few coins there as well. There were 25 of us that made the retreat and that included guests. The retreat starts Friday at noon and usually ends Sunday at noon.

Our theme for this year's retreat was Ice Cream "Sew"cial. We made ice cream cone blocks to be given to the lucky winner. We had a brown bag with a fat quarter (that is 1/2 yd. of material cut in half widthwise), of our favorite ice cream flavor and a story telling why and then we had to guess each person's flavor. That was difficult. The winner guessed seven of the flavors!
The ladies in the background are at the cutting table cutting and visiting. As you can see it isn't all head bent over the sewing machine! You can see projects in the background that came for show and tell.
These lighthouse blocks are for Jo as she chose lighthouses for her theme for a share-a-square block. After one has joined the club, the other members will make a block of her choice for a quilt top to be put together by that member. It is a special quilt as we sign our name to our block.
This is the Jordan bunch...
This caught my eye. Roma took a class for this wall hanging. Stunning!
Wyna's internet quilt. I can't remember how many little blocks. She had to figure out how to do each one. Not my cup of tea! It is beautiful!


This is one of two games that we played. Of course our name tags were ice cream cones with different colored ice cream buttons sewed on them. The color of my button was green so there were three others with green topped cones! That was our team! We had to come up with a name and we called ourselves the "Tutti-Frutti Pedal Pushers!! Did I tell you it was hard to get any sewing done in long stretches?! This GAME was to toss the cotton ball off of the ice cream spoon into ice cream bowls set at a distance. Of course we had to keep our toe behind the tape! I couldn't get my cotton ball in the bowl and "close" didn't count!! But our team one as two of the members were hot shot cotton throwers!!

Our other game was a dice game that we played with five fat quarters as the "bootie", is that the right word, gambler that I am?? Anyway, there are three dice and they can say R for right, L for left, and C for center. We just followed the directions on the dice and if it said R that person on our right got a fat quarter or it went left or the the center. The one left with material won the material in the center of the table! I didn't win, but I got rid of some fat quarters...
Brenda won the ice cream blocks. She was very excited and it will be fun to see what she does with them.

We were given material to trace and ice cream cone (the size of the ones we did) and we got everyone's signature that attended. We were given a fat quarter of the yellowed coned material hanging on the bulletin board to complete this little wall hanging.

We also had a show and tell with the Colstrip quilting ladies. They provided lunch of salads and more on Saturday noon and that was a fun interlude. See, not much sewing, but lots of looking and getting new ideas...

Saturday afternoon after the showing, we had ice cream and toppings with Colstrip ladies. Thankfully the kitchen kept all the goodies and fruit that we brought, so one had to make a decision to walk down the hall to the kitchen to munch! Many times it has been in the sewing area and it is so had to resist as we have some REALLY good COOKS!