Retreat - Day Five

What an indulgence to get away to a sewing retreat.  There is one more booked for 2017 and it's months away. And there are four booked for 2018.  It's so worth it to get away.  

The group was up early for the last day and packing up all their stuff.  Some left around 11, but the troopers (Ronda and Laura and I) stayed for a yummy lunch of leftovers and then we headed out around 12:30.  

I manged to get some last minute projects done before packing up so I was happy about that. 

Into the traffic for the trip home.  Was it going to be good or bad?  I programmed my home address into the GPS so I could see if it gave me traffic avoidance directions. It said that I would arrive at home at 14:25. The traffic moved along pretty well for the first 30 K and then there was a slow down. But it picked up again and slowed down.  

As I was nearing the city, my GPS was taking me to the 401 which is a crazy highway with lots of traffic. Obviously no traffic avoidance happening here.  I wasn't planning on going that way and was going to take the 407 which is the toll highway. I get free mileage on Sunday (well a certain number of KMs). However I noticed signs that the on-ramp to the 407 was closed.  WHAT?????    Thankfully the signs were well enough in advance that I got off one exit early and then detoured to the next on-ramp.  A slight delay but so worth it. 

I got home at 14:37 which isn't bad considering I had to take a detour and go through several bouts of stop and go traffic!

I did check on the internet about my GPS.  Turns out that I have the NUVI 66 LM by Garmin.  If I want to have traffic avoidance, I need the NUVI 66 LMT.  The T stands for traffic avoidance. You can't upgrade!  That solves that technology question. 

The girls were quite happy to see me and we had a good cuddle. When I retired to the gazebo with my book and my tea, they happily settled around me.  Ah - it's great to be away, but even greater to be home!

I hadn't even unpacked the car at this point - except for the food items that I brought home. Finally I managed to get the energy to unload the car. Bag by bag, I carried the stuff downstairs and slowly unpacked everything and put it away. Yes - I found a home for almost everything. There were a few projects that needed to stay out as they need to be worked on immediately. 

I then spent the entire evening editing my blog posts for QUILTsocial. I didn't quite make the deadline for all the posts and I feel very badly about that, but the goal is to finish most of them tonight and the last bit tomorrow night. When I write my personal blog posts, I'm not that picky about the grammar and other things and sometimes the words may come out a bit jumbled.  I'm writing how I talk so it's easy. But when I do a QUILTsocial blog post, I'm talking about a subject and I may have to check the name of something, get the facts right or rejig the words so everyone can understand me!

I did take some pictures last night, but I didn't have time to edit them.  I still have a couple of pictures from last week in a post and here they are. Motivational Monday post will be tomorrow. 

When I was at Monday sewing last week, I realised that the girls have gone to hell in a hand basket!  They're working on these tiny scrap quilts that are crazy!

Look at the size of the nine-patches that they're working on.  The BIG one is Maria's and the little one is Diane's. 

Teeny nine-patches

The teeny ones are for a quilt called 99 Bottles (Joan Ford - Scraptherapy).  This is Jan's quilt below. Jan is the crazy one since she started this craziness!   A great ender and leader project, but doesn't use up a lot of fabric!  I have the book and had intentions of making this quilt - just never got there yet!

A small part of Jan's Ninety-nine bottle quilt

And on that note, after a sleep deprived night, I'm off to work.

Have a great day!!!!

Ciao!