Stitchville Retreat - Part One

Just returned from a delightful weekend of stitching.  The end of the weekend is always bittersweet.  We go home happy with wonderful goodies and beautiful projects (both finished and yet-to-be finished) and also sad, because our weekend of fun is over.  Now the countdown begins for next year's retreat.

This was the fourth Stitchville retreat...each year we have the opportunity to meet one of the needlework industry's top designers.  This year's guest of honor was Linda from Chessie and Me.

Over the years, I have enjoyed stitching a number of Linda's designs; I've collected even more of them (I'm sure you can relate.)  Linda designed some wonderful pieces for our weekend retreat.

Do you remember the project that was released by Chessie and Me last fall?  It was a "Fall-ish" design that was mounted on a paper mache box...well, we were treated to the "Spring" version of this design.  We received the design and stitching supplies a few weeks ago so that we could focus on finishing our boxes.  Here's a picture of the finished box - outside top:

And a picture of the inside cover:

But our boxes didn't look like this to begin with; they were sort of a "pepto bismal" pink.  I should have taken a picture of that stage -- sorry, I forgot.  We waxed the areas of the box that we wanted to look worn and then painted our boxes black.  Here's the black box "cemetery"...

After the boxes were dry, we roughed them up a bit with some sandpaper and then sprayed them with some polyurethane and they were ready to be finished!  After securing our stitched pieces to some wool, we glued them to our boxes.  Mine turned out pretty good, don't you think?

See that cute little strawberry?  It was a gift from Linda!  I love my box, it turned out great.

Deb from Stitchville and the other Deb (aka "the Debs") did a wonderful job with the retreat as they always do.  They look after every detail.  There's always a little welcome gift in our rooms... (It looks like one of my caramels is missing.  How did that happen?)

The tables in our stitching room are always beautifully decorated...

All of those wonderful goodies came home with us!  And in addition there was a project bag filled with some additional goodies...

Details, details...those two are so good at taking care of all the details!

Our second project of the weekend was this wonderful sampler...

Love the colors and the verse at the bottom...

"In the Springtime of your Youth
Be sure the seed you sow
That in the Harvest of old age
The good there of you will know."

Of course there was more to the weekend - lots of time for visiting with old and new friends, many Chessie and Me models and stitcher finishes to "ooh and aah" over and some of the attendees brought some of their recently finished projects along.  Tune back in tomorrow for more of the fun!