The early drafts of this article were a lot longer … a jumble of feelings about retreat and family and self-centered fellow quilters. But a common theme emerged: design choices.

After settling in and tackling a complicated block on the first day of retreat, I was headed back out there for the second day, which would be shorter due to my need to be present for bowling league championships in the evening.

It’s about a thirty-minute drive to retreat, depending on traffic, and I used to call and talk to my parents (hands-free, of course) on the way to retreat. I’d only been to one or two retreats since Dad died, so it still felt a little weird to be talking to just one parent.

But Mom and I had a great chat about how the crafter gets to choose what the final product looks like, and how it’s totally fine to make adjustments to the design. I confessed that I was not a big fan of the scalloped edge on the Dear Jane quilt, and was considering not even doing that on mine.

Once I arrived at retreat, I put that notion (of the crafter having final say) to use, changing up the design for this block.

The pattern from the Dear Jane software has you create the block in four triangle quadrants, appliquéing part of the clover shape on to each triangle and then sewing the four triangles together. And I guess I could understand it if they had split it into four square quadrants, so you were using the seam to avoid trying to appliqué a fairly deep inner point.

But instead, they divvied it up so that the seams broke up the shallower inner points. I just don’t see “the point” of this. Maybe if I was doing something fun with stripes where they all met in the middle or something … but I wasn’t working with striped fabric.

So, I cut out the four appliqué pattern pieces and taped them together to create one big appliqué pattern piece. It was smooth sailing from there. An excellent choice for my short day at retreat.

The only downer that day was another retreat-goer whose workspace was near mine, going into great detail about their personal dramas. I like to chat, or at least listen to others chat, while I quilt, but by the end of the day, I felt wrung out from processing a relative stranger’s life events.

The next day, I was back at retreat and spent some time in the dining area, where I could spread out a completed quilt top, batting, and backing on a large table and baste the three layers together without having to crawl around on the floor.

I was really surprised at the number of people who came by to chat and check out my quilt top of interlocking blue swirl shapes. We talked about color and fabric placement choices; a technique I had tried out to “fade out” the pattern at the edges of the quilt; basting approaches; and how best to keep track of all the pieces in a complicated quilt.

But somehow it just took one quilter (incredulous as to why anyone would bother to use my “fade out” technique that I’d been so pleased about) to spoil the mood of the afternoon. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was the same person who regaled the room with their personal dramas throughout retreat.

Maybe I was being too sensitive. Or maybe I was just tired and sweaty from working my way up and down a bed-sized quilt with a basting needle for a few hours. But I didn’t get very much further after that.

With a little distance from an unexpectedly emotional retreat experience though, I remain happy with my design choices: my mostly-made decision to not do the scalloped edges, my “fade out” technique on the partly-basted quilt, and my reworking of the pattern for this block.