Floss Fight at The Sage Inn

This past weekend my Monday Night Stitch Therapy group had our long awaited stitch weekend/retreat at the Sage Inn B& B in Dover, Kansas. Dover is a very small unincorporated community 13 miles west of Topeka. You will remember we made a one night trial run at this same location. We had been looking forward to this weekend and we were not disappointed. A great time was has by all. I even said I thought someone messed with the time and made things speed up and gave us less time there. Everyone arrived around 4:00PM. That is the earliest they would let us come. Some took the entire day off work in anticipation of our big weekend. Since it is a B&B we had to figure out what to eat outside of the breakfast provided. You know we are all concerned about eating. On Friday night we ate at the little community cafe across the street. They had a buffet of mystery meat (beef ribs???), corn, baked potatoes (big!!!) and salad. It even came with chocolate cake for dessert.

Last time we stitched in the living room, but this time we decided that the dining room was better. Better light and a little bigger for all of our stuff. I did not get any pictures of the room with us all in there.

Although we have been stitching together for some time, we had never come up with a name for ourselves. We had tried several times, but nothing really stuck. Did not feel the Stitch 'n Bitch Club was unique enough for us. Finally this weekend we named ourselves the "Sunflower Stitchers". I think all or almost all of us were born and raised in Kansas and the Sunflower is our state flower. Besides the LNS where we stitch weekly is called The Sunflower Seed. Also, we are also beautiful that we should use a flower in our name. Here is a picture of all of us that was taken Saturday afternoon. We had said that we were not going to get out of our jammies all day, but you can see that we did. Comfortable clothes, but not jammies.

Our picture was taken on the back deck and this is the view of the backyard from the deck.

Have any of you heard of the children's book, Flat Stanley? flat Stanley is a flat drawing of a little boy. I took a page out of that story and something done by my STO Yahoo group when they had a retreat. Had been getting comments from Martha of Gone Stitching regarding us going on our retreat and how envious she was of our chance to do the retreat. She is trying to set something similar up with her stitching group and encountering some issues. So I decided to take Flat Martha with me to the retreat. I went to her blog and printed off the picture she had of herself on her blog. Now she tells me it is a really old picture of her. Whatever, I just needed one fast, since I only thought of doing this on Friday morning. So here are some pictures of Flat Martha at the retreat.

Flat Martha in the middle of the Dining Room Table


Flat Martha in amongst the snacks

Day 1 Breakfast

Day 1 Breakfast with all the other things served

Flat Martha with Day 2 Breakfast

Yes, that is stuff French Toast

I made up goody bags for everyone with things that others donated. Included were colored loose leaf rings, floss drops, initial note cards, colored binder clips, tootsie pops, highlighter and many more fun things. Since the note cards were specific to each person, I had to put name tags on them. In trying to figure out how to tie them on, I came across a bag of Loose Threads from GAST that I had been given some where. It contained 2-3 lengths of various Sampler Threads, but not labeled. I picked colors that fit each person and then tied the names on with the thread. Now they all have to figure out which color they got.

Reina has made lots of beaded fobs and other jewelry. So she brought all her beads along and assisted us all in making a fob for our scissors. Here are Jan and Reina working on fobs. Anita is seated in the background and Marcia is off to the side.

Here is the fob that I made. Purple, of course. While I was making my fob, I figured out that Reina had made this wonderful bracelet she gave me a while back. My fob has some of the same purple beads in it that my bracelet does. Love that bracelet because it fits nice and does not slip off like a lot of mine do.

Anita, The original Sunflower Seed, designed a little piece for us to stitch at the retreat. And to most people's surprise, I stitched it all up while at the retreat. I meant to get a picture of her model, but I did not. It goes in a black frame with some glued on wooden ornaments of a witch and her boot or hat. So very cute. My door looks a little wonky in the picture, but I have since re-done the back stitching and it looks a lot better. It is at the shop for framing. The fabric color does not show up very good since I laid it on a white table to take the picture. Fabric is R&R 18th Century Rook stitched with sampler threads and a brass bat charm. I just love it.

We also played our games of CLR Floss, Scavenger Hunt and Stitcher's Bingo. There was a bag of stitchy stash items donated by others in the group for the winners to draw from. Anita won the Scavenger Hunt. Various people won in Bingo. We played 3 rounds of CLR Floss. Two rounds with DMC floss and one with overdyed floss (Sampler Threads, WDW or Crescent Colours). I had planned to divide the 9 of us into two tables so more people could win, but the group thought it would be more fun to do it all together. So each winner won 27 skeins of floss. Reita and Janet won in the two rounds with DMC and I won the Overdyed Floss. Woo Hoo!!! I did not even cheat. Everyone really liked playing the CLR Floss game. I had put 82 items on the Scavenger Hunt list and I only had 48 of them in my stitch bag. Guess I should have read the list closer. I was going to list some of the things include on the Scavenger List, but my post is getting rather long and I still want to include some of funny quotes that I recorded during the weekend.

When we first started having retreats or special stitch days, I started writing down all the strange and funny little things that were said. Most I can attribute to the correct individual, but will leave that off so as not to ruin some of the quoted's reputation. Many of these are "you had to be there", but others you will find the humor in just reading them.

- We need to loosen up. response: Jan, you are way to loose.

- Aged Pewter-I sort of feel like that some mornings.

- All in favor of Jan ripping out---unanimous

- Whole lotta slapping going on, led to "Let's Get Physical", led to a discussion of John Travolta being fat, old and pointed headed. John your Hunk days are over.

- Oh, my ears have stopped bleeding. The owners insisted on playing elevator music for us and no one liked it. So when they would leave we would change it and then when they came back they would change it back, so one time after it was turned off we were relieved. This could also apply to the fact that the owner spent all afternoon mowing the front yard right outside the room where we were. Most of that part of the yard did not even have grass. Maybe he just wanted to look at the lovelies. LOL!!

- Be careful I can see your cord.

- Snot sisters, sniffling sisters. We always end up sniffling at the same time and especially after a major laughing episode.

It is getting late and I have been working on this way too long. I will put more in the next post. I have another finish and a couple of other things ready for the next post, so these quotes will be continued later.

After all this I did not mention that we even did some of our own cooking for the other meals besides breakfast. Next post.

Janet decided that we needed to award a booby prize to one member each time we have a retreat. This time the overwhelming winner was Jan (aka TP). Her is Jan with her new doll with stick pins. This will become a tradition in future retreats. Jan will make the award next time. We are betting that Janet will get it back.

As we were all packing up Sunday morning, plans were being made for the next time. We are hoping to do this again in the spring. If not then, we will absolutely do it again next fall. It is hard to put in writing all the fun and pleasure we get out of each other's company. We are truly becoming stitching sister, maybe even snotty sisters. Several other took more pictures than I did, so I will try to get some more pictures to post with the next round of quotes.

Blogger has been a little temperamental tonight, so this has taken way longer than I planned. Taking valuable stitching time. Tomorrow I work at the LNS, so need to go get things together to be gone tomorrow. Been rainy, dreary and cool the last couple of days. Supposed to clear up by the weekend. Love fall, but not sure about the winter to follow.

Thanks for stopping in and reading all this babbling. Hope it was not too much. Keep on stitching.