Life's A Bear

 And slowly this bear is coming out of hibernation.  The old computer has been repaired and I have finally found my blog on it.  So I thought it about time I check in.

After a busy catch-up week, I am retreating in the North Carolina mountains this week along with 23 other quilters at Cindy Williams' annual Life's a Bear retreat.  This year we are at the Hinton Center in Hayesville, NC, working on Lollapalooza, a combination compass/lone star pattern.

I opted not to do the lone star portion of the quilt on the first day; instead, I worked on finishing an ages-old lone star.  

This is Judy Neimeyer's Summer Solstice.  I took this class at Quilt Camp in 2018 because I thought it would be an "easy" introduction to paper piecing.  I got the 8 New York Beauty blocks done in two days, but balked at paper piecing the lone star portion when I knew strip piecing to be much easier.  Five years later I still need to square out the corners and add borders.  But I'm happy to have moved it along.

On day two I made the 18-inch outer compass  and on day three I made the 8-inche center compass ...  Sadly, no photos because apparently the Cloud doesn't extend to the mountains 😒

I managed to put the compass all together today, then pulled out an old Judy Mathieson compass I started in a 2006/7 class with her.  It is paper-pieced with the perforated freezer paper.  A fun technique, but after unstitching multiple seams today, I threw in the towel.

I'm hoping the pictures will appear on the new computer when I get home tomorrow.