October 2007 Cleveland Retreat

The retreat weekend started off a little hectic. I took Friday off of work so that I could pack up everything and be ready to go when Maddy called to say that she was leaving work. When she called at 2, I was very close to leaving to drop the dogs off. I just had to pack up the car. I ended up not getting to Maddy's house until just before 3 PM and we were on our way north by a little after 3. Maddy and I both wanted to stop on our way to pick up some fabric that we needed for projects that we had taken with us.

With a lot of luck, we were able to stop at the Glass Thimble in Columbus. They were open until 5 and we got there right at 5. We ran in to make sure that they would let us shop a bit even though they were closing and they said of course so we ran back out to the car to get our fabrics to match. After 35 minutes, we were back on our way only to stop an exit or two north of this store for dinner at Bob Evans. It was yummy! We also saw Quilt Trends, which is really the store that I wanted to stop at because they were promoting a moving sale on their website. It ended up being behind the Bob Evans that we stopped at. Very ironic since we had wanted to stop there in the first place!

After dinner and a long drive, we pulled into the driveway of the sewing semi-house around 8 PM. We started unpacking the car and setting up our areas and then looking around.

This is the view from the door of the place. Directly in front of the door was a huge cutting table that was at a perfect height for cutting anything. And we climbed up on the table many times to lay stuff out. You can see Maddy across the room on the left. That was where she and I sewed. Behind Maryanne, you can see part of Shirley at her sewing table.

The cutting table had shelves on 2 sides and drawers on the other two sides. When we were looking for tools that we needed, we would look in the drawers to see if we could find something. Well, this is what we found:

An entire drawer of thread! And when Dora, the owner, came back from her trip, she brought at least 10 more cones of thread!

In the first picture, there are cabinets behind Maddy and all along that wall that you can see. The cabinets also lined the wall opposite Maddy where the entrance was. This is what was in each cabinet.

This was my view from my sewing area:

The long arm was to the left of the cutting table from the entrance. Needless to say, there was plenty of room for all of us to work comfortably in!

Friday night, while we waited for Carol and Brenda to arrive from Dayton, I worked on the fall big shirt for mom. Here is the finished shirt that Maddy so graciously modeled. I did the buttonholes and the buttons on the machine and it worked beautifully!

I practically had to rip the shirt off of her because she didn't want to give it up!

After I finished the fall shirt, I decided that I better get to work on the Halloween shirt that I had all of the pieces already cut out for. I got a lot sewn on Friday night, but I also realized that I should redo the handouts that were given in the class because I had written so many notes to myself that I was having trouble reading them.

Once I had made progress on the second shirt, Maddy and Maryanne decided that they had had enough and I had to leave with them. We made plans on meeting back at the sewing center the next morning and off we went.