I entered the retreat last week with four friends and left with fifteen more. Isn't that how quilters are? We just love one another.
One sweet lady named Nicole would go around the group each day and give us all a brief back rub. Her fingers were pro! She is also the one that we share all those itty bitty scraps with - you know - those scraps that you would throw away because they are so small. Here she is with her show-n-tell.
I also discovered that two of my "before retreat" friends love to read/listen to lots of books. That lead to the discovery of more "new friends" which lead to the exchange of Goodreads accounts and book recommendations.
New recipes were also exchanged as is typical of the wonderful quilting community.
We played fun little games including quilter's bingo, quilter's scavenger hunt with selfies being a requirement as we did the scavengering, a photo booth, and a typical show-n-tell night.
The theme was "Pajama Party". We were supposed to wear our pj's every day, but our little group of 5 were newbies and didn't have that many pairs of pj's that were dubbed "cute enough" to hang out in. We wore our matching shirts each day instead.
Here we are at the photo booth.
Our little group took a daily walk where we saw deer right outside the house.
We started a Row by Row Quilt round robin among new friends. I will share more about that in a later post.
We all signed up for foot zoning and foot massages. What a treat! This is Mia, the retreat owner's daughter. She made us all feel GREAT!
The facility we stayed at was the most interesting place I have ever seen, so much that, the owner invited us to take a tour. We visited a total of five homes, each with their own name: Sunrise and Sunset are the only ones I can remember. We stayed in Sunset. As you can likely imagine, it was the home on the West side while Sunrise was on the East. There was a parking garage that fit every single one of our vehicles inside, and we only filled half of it. Every home was accessible from this huge garage. There was a ballroom where we all sewed, complete with an elevator that took our "stuff" up to the ballroom, and wagons to pull our "stuff" to the ballroom. The woman who owns this remarkable place rents it out for family reunions and retreats. Believe it or not, she runs it all by herself and is 82 years old! She just lost her husband last year. She didn't build the facility, but purchased it after it had been on the market for 18 years. She and her husband did much work to improve and upgrade it including. The history was fascinating to me.
There was a green house, a racquet ball court, and a nursery. Look at the beautiful geraniums!
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