It's now official; the quilt retreat is this weekend. I don't have any special meetings or anything going on, and there doesn't seem to be any reason to put it off. And with the Super Bowl on Sunday, there is a kind of holiday feel to the weekend already. So from tomorrow night until Monday night, I'm going to be in the studio except for the times I need to be working. I even went looking for crockpot recipes today so I would have good food to eat (gumbo and pork chops, in case you're wondering).

Here are the projects I plan to work on:
1. The Christmas gift project - I'm a little over 1/3 finished with the piecing, and I plan to be 1/3 finished by Monday night. This is not a stretch by any means. The fabrics are already on the table, although I'm nearly out of cut pieces. The piecing is pretty mindless. A good project to work on while I listen to an audiobook.
2. The Twisted Stars quilt - arrive at a "final" layout. I'm not far from there now; I just need to do some climbing to work on the upper rows. This works well in small increments. Whatever condition it's in on Monday night, I will photograph it and declare it ready for assembly.
3. The Double Wedding Ring - I still can't manage more than an hour a day of hand-quilting, but 5 days is 5 hours. Forward momentum.
4. A spring wall hanging that's been on my table for a while. It needs dimensional flowers to supplement the few that are already there. Last summer I bought a whole bunch of the new Clover yo-yo makers. It's time to get them out, along with the book on origami flowers, make some decisions, and move this project closer to done. It also satisfies the requirements of the Quilting for the Rest of Us challenge.
5. Finish quilting the Yellow Brick Road quilt that I started machine quilting a few years ago. This one is a maybe, depending on getting the other machine work done. It's about half quilted, and not very skillfully at that, so I'd like to just move it off the list. If there's anything that has a chance of being completely finished at the end of the weekend, this is it. That's the incentive to move other things along so I can set up the machine for it and work on it.

So that's the plan. Tomorrow I have Bible study in Lake Providence and I will make a Walmart run for groceries and pet supplies on the way home. Once I'm home, the retreat can begin. Today I got some work out of the way, and went into the studio long enough to clear away some of the clutter and finish up the one piece of the Christmas project that was nearly done. We won't talk about the condition of the floor or the clutter in the corners; I'll deal with that stuff when it bothers me.

Oh, and I will post pictures from time to time. Progress must be recorded and celebrated.