I’ve been splitting each set of four sashed blocks across two months. Usually I complete the bottom two in the sashing set first, and then in the following month I do the two blocks over them. But I didn’t finish assembling one of the underneath blocks until March, so I did this set in the opposite order.

The original plan was to sash those two top blocks in March. I cut out and marked all the sashing pieces, and stitched the sashing to one of the blocks.

And then I sustained an eye injury and couldn’t quilt for several days. I didn’t pick the sashing up again until mid-April. After missing the mark on my March quilting goals, I was ready to overachieve in April, at my first in-person quilting retreat since 2019.

It was awesome to be back at retreat again – seeing my quilty friends, working on quilty projects, feeding off all that quilty energy. But it was also pretty overwhelming.

At past retreats, the retreat goers were spread across multiple buildings, but with a much smaller total attendance post-pandemic, all 30+ attendees were in one big room, and I didn’t know most of them.

So I was already feeling kind of overwhelmed as soon as I walked in the door. I set up my cutting mat at my station, got my lamp plugged in, spread out my supplies, and got to work on the sashing.

By late afternoon I’d finished the sashing on all four blocks and stitched them to each other. I tried to start a new block, but I felt like I’d already gone into double overtime on the sashing. I was overtired, overstimulated, and underperforming.

But I wasn’t quite ready to call it a day on my first day of retreat. So, I switched gears. One of the cool things about retreat is that you have a bunch of other quilters there to bounce ideas off of.

I’d been struggling with a different quilt project and needed some advice. I’d finished a quilt top that had a cobalt blue border, and had purchased what I thought was enough fabric to do the backing in the same fabric.

But the fabric got sun-damaged, so I started exploring other backing options. I purchased some backing fabric online that I thought would be a good match, but once it arrived in the mail, I was disappointed to see it was a warmer denim navy blue that didn’t look right at all next to the cobalt blue. I was both underwhelmed and overwhelmed by my fabric choice and how it didn’t match the quilt top. You can see that the original blue fabric on the left looks practically purple, with a sun-damaged streak across it, and the new blue fabric on the right looks almost grey by comparison:

So, I polled my retreat friends about whether I could salvage the original cobalt blue backing fabric, piecing it in a way that worked around the sun-faded parts. We unfolded it, took measurements, and speculated about whether it could work.

In the middle of this discussion, I moved the denim navy fabric “out of the way”, setting it in the middle of the quilt top – and wonder of wonders, it looked just fine (and much more blue) set against the blocks:

I’d planned to do a “pieced” binding with assorted fabrics from the center of the quilt anyways, so the consensus was that, with carefully chosen binding fabrics, this could totally work. How often would you fold over the quilt to where you see the front and the back underneath at the same time?

So, theoretically that decision has been made, although I’m now toying with redoing the borders in the denim navy fabric, but a) I’m not sure I have enough; and b) that’s a lot of unpicking and resewing. I definitely need more time to ponder over my options.

Overall, the backing discussion was helpful for more than just the blue swirls quilt – it will also be useful when it comes time to back my Dear Jane quilt. The “kit” only came with 5 yards of backing fabric, and I’m not sure that will be enough to cover the whole back of the behemoth 7 foot square Dear Jane.

I’m toying with the idea of pieced stripes on the back of the Dear Jane, alternating the backing from Paulette with the red background fabric, if there’s enough left over.

But final decisions on the backing for the Dear Jane quilt is still many years away. For now, upward and onward … to the next day of retreat and the next block!