All Good Things Come to an End

As the saying goes, "All good things must come to an end." It was a fun week at Joan's house. Our "Under the Sea" themed retreat ended today. I enjoyed spending Tuesday and Wednesday with my stitching buddies; on Thursday and Friday, I joined them in the evening after work.

Here are a few more pictures for you - first up - the four completed "A Token of Friendship" booklets. This is a design from With My Needle. Moving left to right: Cathy's, Joan's, Jill's, and Jackie's.




Two more books need to be finished yet. I'll try to post photos of those when they are finished. It was a lot of fun stitching these squares for each other throughout the year!

The other thing about this retreat that everyone looks forward to is putting together a little gift bag for each stitcher. Of course, the goal is to find things that are related to the theme. I shared my gift items with you on a previous post, but here are some of the others. You can see that this is a very creative bunch!

This first collection of items came from Jackie. She had taken a trip to Hawaii earlier this year and brought bags for all of us. They have sea turtles on them! Might I add, these will be really great bags for carting stitching projects around!



You can click on the photos to get a closer look at all the goodies, but here's a close up of the fish that jackie stitched for me. It's finished as a coaster!



Next up, Joan's gift. Joan always stitches themed pillow cases for us. This year we got a big one (for a normal sized bed pillow) and a smaller one to fit the pillow pictured. You will have to click on the photos for close ups. Joan's daughters got in the act; one daughter found the sea horse spreader, the other daughter found the fishy glass...



Joan stitched each of us a mermaid floss tag holder and adorned it with some hand made pins.



Lori gave each of us a project bag filled with goodies. Lots of fishy themed treats and other doo-dads. She stitched each of us a fishy fob but didn't have time to finish it because she was busy baking and cooking for the retreat. No worries though, we'll all have our fobs finished up in no time!



Finally, here's Jill's gift. Jill found some fishy fabric to adorn a project bag. As you saw in a previous post, Jill's mom crocheted us each a pair of fish slippers - I love them! Jill stitched an alphabet fish pinkeep(pattern from Carriage House Samplings), made a beaded needlecase (with a fish design), created a beaded fob that said "under the sea", and gave us each a fish scissors and fish shaped threadwinder. Wowzers, she was busy!



Here's a close up of the pinkeep and the beaded needle case:



I feel very fortunate to have been welcomed into this group of stitchers. It's fun getting together with them on Friday nights and I enjoyed getting together with them this week.

One more funny thing happened this week that I forgot to tell you about. On Tuesday, our friend Chris arrived to work on the friendship booklets. She brought with her a new Ott task light that she had just purchased at JoAnn's. Of course, after seeing it, we all had to have one too! Tuesday afternoon we made the trek to not one, but two JoAnn stores so that we could purchase five more of these lights! It runs on three AAA batteries and is quite bright. It's also very lightweight - will be a great light to take with when traveling.



Well, that concludes the retreat reports from this week. Since I've been gone most of the week, I think I better get busy and get some housecleaning and laundry done.

Until next time....Happy Stitching!