Bonnie Hunter's 2015 Mystery Quilt-a-long has started! Allietare, Link-up #1

It's that time of year again - when Bonnie Hunter thanks all her followers with a free mystery quilt-a-long! I have participated for the last 4 years, with 2 finished quilts, 1 flimsy and 1 still in pieces to show for it!

This year I had decided that I have way too many projects started, and I wasn't going to do the mystery - but...

I couldn't resist the pull!  I'm only going to make about 1/16th of each of the units, in the hopes I end up with a pillow-size finish.  I haven't pulled my fabrics - I'll do that as each step is released but I did get my first 20 units of Step 1 done. (294/16 = 18.375 rounded up to 20).

How did I come up with 1/16th?  Bonnie usually does large quilts, between a double and queen - so I estimated her quilt will finish at about 80x80; 1/4 is 40x40; 1/16 should be about 20x20 - a nice size pillow cover.

I've used the same grey in several quilts already, and this is the very last of it. I will miss it!

Here are my other Mystery quilts, finished and in progress:

Orca Bay - my first and favourite!  It wasn't until this year that I realized I had made a mistake in assembling the blocks - can you find it? That's the beauty of scrappy quilts - they hide a multitude of mistakes.

Easy Street - the biggest quilt I have ever made.  I upsized this to King-size and gifted it to my daughter and her husband. Quilt-inspector Daisy approved.

Celtic Solstice - I down-sized this one to about twin-size and changed the border. Still in the queue to be quilted.

And finally, Grand Illusion:

I decided to stay within a single designer and mostly one fabric line (Jason Yenter/Shangri-la), but I am not happy working with such limited fabrics. Bonnie's quilts deserve to be scrappy, and appeal to my sense of adventure.  I have finished Step One and working on Step Two.  I'm going to finish up the units I have started, and maybe assemble a smaller quilt.

Be sure to check out what everyone else has been up to at the Linky Party on Bonnie's blog.

  

While I was waiting...a quilty finish

 

While I was anxiously waiting for word from the hospital, I picked up a project that has been waiting in the wings for a while.  I only had 5 blocks to finish assembling and a few more blocks for the borders.

 

 

Since Bonnie Hunter has announced the fabric choices for her newest mystery quilt,  Grand Illusion, I better get this one done.  I only made 1/2 the amount of blocks required, but looking at it I think I needed one more row on the bottom (it is hanging sideways on the clothesline). Oh, well, I'm not taking it apart now.

 

I modified the border to emphasize the points of the stars more, and used Bonnie's pieced cornerstones (I redrafted it to a 3 1/2" block) for the corners.  I like it!

 

 

I went to bed at about 2 a.m. and Mya was born at 4:16 a.m.  I had both Zoey and Alex for a sleepover, but lucky for me the kids slept in until about 8:30 so I did get some sleep.

 

Then we headed to the hospital for some baby snuggles!

 

 

She's a chunky monkey at 8 lbs, 11 oz. with lots of dark hair. I think she's going to end up fair though, because there are blond tinges to it and her eyebrows and eyelashes are blond, unlike her sister who had dark ones.  Her eyes are lighter, too.  Zoey's were jet-black when she was born, and are now light brown.

 

 

 

This is a close as Zoey would come to holding her.  She spent most of the time ignoring her!  Alex was in love though, and he will be a great big cousin!

 

 



Easy Street - not much progress since the reveal!

Here is what I have done so far!

 Alex loves to help me layout blocks!

I had a slow-down in my progress after making up the corner triangle and 1 setting triangle from Step #7.  I really want this quilt to go to my daughter and her husband, but the final result ended up more aqua (Bonnie's lime) than purple liked I had hoped. But sometimes that's the trouble when you try to change around colours on a mystery quilt! If it was for me, it wouldn't have been a problem, I love aqua.

I found some lighter purples in my stash and made up another corner.  I was starting to feel like Goldilocks - they were too light.

I bought  more medium purples to substitute and made up some sample blocks and my daughter loves the result - so my Easy Street is dark purple, medium purple and lime - no aqua to be found!

And this is Alex's vision of the quilt so far! I think it would be a little hard to quilt ;o)

Easy Street #3 is live!

 

Bonnie Hunter is so generous and I love her consistency!  She uses Blogger's scheduling feature to have her posts go live before most of us are even out of bed.  This week's step 3 requires I do more colour adjustments:

 

My colours are the same as Bonnie's, just with more emphasis on the purple and less on the lime.

 

 

Her purple is my LIME, her aqua is my PURPLE, and her lime is my AQUA.  It gets confusing so I printed out my mockup and labeled the colours A, B, and C. So, tomorrow (too much going on today), I will be cutting 2" Lime squares, and HST from Purple 3 1/2" strips.  If I don't write it down here today, I'll forget by tomorrow!

 

I missed some additional cutting in Step 2 - I need 64 (+ for king size) 2"x 3 1/2" black-on-white rectangles 'for future use' and in Step 3, she also wants to cut 2 - 3" squares - my colour will be Aqua.

 

I have a feeling there are going to be fewer steps this year.  I can already visualize a couple of block possibilities, and as soon as I finish a few of this week's blocks, I'm going to start playing.

 



It's Mystery Quilt time again!

Bonnie Hunter has done it again!  It's called Easy Street and includes two of my favourite colours, aqua and lime green, so I am in.  I'm changing it up a bit with more emphasis on the purple and less on the lime, so that if my daughter likes it, I will size it up to King Size and gift it to her and her husband.  Here's a mockup of the colours in the proportions, based on Bonnie's estimated yardage.

 

I made this using my scrapbooking software (Storybook Creator 4.0 by Creative Memories), so these are samples of scrapbook paper, not actually fabric.  My colours will be close, maybe a bit richer.

 

Don't you just love it!  Bonnie had suggested 3 yards of the lime green, 3 1/4 of the aqua and 2 of the purple, but I'm going to use 2 yards of lime, 3 of aqua and 3 1/4 of the purple.  I have everything on hand except the grey and maybe a few black-on-whites.  I can't wait to start!!

 

I've already talked one friend into joining us, why don't you too?  The mystery starts November 23rd (the day after the American Thanksgiving) and will have one step posted every Friday through to about New Year's or so.  Last year, I made some each week to make sure I had the technique down pat.  I finished it up by the end of January - the fastest I had ever made a quilt start to finish, and it was also the largest! 

Orca Bay Wrap-up!

Bonnie Hunter is doing a final linkup on her blog, http://www.quiltville.blogspot.com/, so we can all share our Mystery Quilts.  This has been a good incentive for me to actually finish a quilt on a timely basis.  I started on November 18th and finished the top January 19th, pretty amazing for a quilt with over 4500 individual pieces!

I love the secondary directional lines created by the "birds" - half-square triangles with wings!  The black/blue lines create a unique sashing effect around the red squares.

This block wasn't planned, but I love it and it shows up in the top corner, so it catches my eye everytime I look at my quilt top.

But this little Heather Ross fishee is my favourite (my mom used to use a fish to mark her ceramics, and I hunted this Heather Ross fabric down to make labels for my quilts) - I just had to add him to the top as well!

I learned so much doing this quilt.  The best thing I learned was webbing the top.  I'm not sure if I got it exactly right as per Bonnie's instructions, but I worked out steps that worked for me.  I'm working out a tutorial on how I did it. 

I used tools I've owned and never used before.

When I was webbing my top, I used my Fons & Porter pins to label which way the blocks should be directed - these ones are marked on the "Up" side.  I put a pin on the top of each column and used a sharpie to put the column number on the back.

Then I labelled the first block in each row. In this case, "R" stood for Row, not right. Again, I numbered the back of the pins.

 I learned how to use my companion angle ruler that I have owned for about 7 years, and never used.  I used it for both quarter-square triangles and to trim down my red string blocks.  I also learned how to make string blocks! I perfected my chain piecing technique, learned that ironing those pieces were a lot easier if you did it before cutting them apart. I learned that anything can be accomplished if you break it down into smaller pieces - now I'm viewing all my UFOs with a different eye! 

Thank you, Bonnie, for a great mystery! I will be joining you for your next adventure!

Sunday Stash Report - Week Four

I am finally finished "Orca Bay"!  What an amazing journey this mystery quilt has been, but that's a topic for another post. The best part has been the amount of fabric moved out of my scrap bins - I only spent about $10 on 10 fat-eighths to expand my selection of black. (but that was before I was counting stash)

Please excuse the lighting - it is almost evening and raining, so I had to turn on all the lights to get this shot.  I'm going to have it quilted by a long-armer, there are way too many seams for me to try and tackle it. I'll count the backing and binding separately for the Stash Report.

Bonnie estimated about 9.5 yards, her EQ plan estimated 17 yards, I think it was closer to about 13 yards or 12 metres. So that is what I'm busting out of here!

Used this Week: 12 metres

Used year to Date: 27 metres

Added this Week: 0

Added Year to Date: 7.6 metres
Net Used for 2012: -19.4 metres

 

I am so glad I discovered Bonnie Hunter and her method of managing scraps and her beautiful way of designing quilts from scraps.  I would never have expected a quilt made entirely of scraps spanning 30 years would be so beautiful! 

I've almost finished another quilt top this week, but it's not ready for counting yet.  Being snowed in has been great for sewing time, but not so great for work - I haven't been able to go for the whole week because there is a stretch of highway between where I live and where I work that has been treacherous with whiteout conditions or freezing rain most of the week.

But after a week of snow and wind, it started raining on Friday.  First we had freezing rain, and my car looked like this yesterday morning:

That ice is about 1/2" thick!

And rumour is our town has one snow plow.  I wouldn't know because it never did come down my street.  Here is what it looked like yesterday morning:

That is snow, ice and freezing rain coating the road.  But 24 hours can bring a huge change.  This is what I woke up to this morning, a bare driveway, a windshield that is clear, and I can see grass again!

By tomorrow, this week of storms will just be a memory.

Sunday Stash Report and Ocra Bay Update

This week I was a good girl and didn't acquire any more fabrics, but I didn't finish anything to count either.  My stats remain the same at:

Used this Week: 0 metres

Used year to Date: 15 metres

Added this Week: 

Added Year to Date: 7.6 metres
Net Used for 2012: -7.4 metres

I hope to have a big finish next week, as I wrap up my Orca Bay mystery quilt.

We had our first real snowfall this weekend and I took advantage of the freed-up time (from a meeting that was cancelled) to finish sewing the pieces of Orca Bay.  I had to finish the "birds" and then sew them to the red string blocks.  Imagine my surprise when I had too many birds left.  I recounted my red strings and I was 32 short!  I'm not sure how that happened - I must of been interrupted when I was cutting the paper bases.

Anyways, I got them finished this morning and after a visit from my grandson and his parents (dad came over to help me put new blinds up in the living room), I played with the layout on my living room floor, the only place big enough to do it.  Even so, I still misjudged its size and had to push furniture out of the way. As I was laying out the blocks, I was sort-of paying attention to the blocks to ensure no two fabrics are beside each other and I was amazed at the final result!  I didn't have to move a single piece - Bonnie is so right when she says it will all work together - the eye blends the colours together so beautifully.

Did anyone else have pieces left over?  I had two of these left, this one and a black version that I made a mistake on:

I couldn't leave them on the floor though.  If I left them out to go back and forth to the sewing machine, Daisy (my dog) would steal the pieces and hide them in her crate!  She stole one right from the bucket I had put them in to bring them upstairs before I even got started but left them alone while I was working on them.

Don't the pieces look wonderful piled in there?  I've done a pretty close estimate of the number of pieces I have sewn at 4,352.  I have another 420 to add when I put the border on. 

I'm going to try webbing the top Bonnie-Hunter fashion so I've stacked the blocks in columns and rows.  If I'm successful I'm going to do a more detailed tutorial because I'm still a little confused on how it works.

I'm finally making good use of these Fons & Porters pins I bought a few years ago.  I have modified them by adding numbers to the back:

I'm using the U (up) pins to make the tops of the columns and the column number; and R (Right or Row) to mark the row number as I stack.

Here's the beginning - wish me luck!

And just because, here are some updated pictures of the grandbabies.

Zoey helped me take down the Christmas decorations (well, played with the tissue).  I just love her Pebbles hairdo.

And Alex tried to make show angels today.  It was a little hard because there was ice on top of the snow.  We had everything yesterday, from snow to freezing rain to weird little mini-snowballs - I thought it was hail but it was funny puff-balls of snow.  There was even a funnel cloud spotted in Vancouver.  Today was beautiful and sunny, but more snow is on the way.

PS: Have you discovered the "Just Take 2" quilt-along yet?  Check out my previous post, about 3 paragraphs down for more infor. I've done the first 4 of 6 blocks, and 5 more were released today.  I did mine in aqua and white, but I not sure if I want to do a whole quilt in it.  It just doesn't have the punch of red & white, but that's another topic for a different day.

Orca Bay update.. or how I spent my New Year's Eve.

New Year's Eve has never been a party night for me, unlike a lot of people.  As a teenager, I babysat as many kids as I could because it was good money.  As a young married woman, we hosted a party the first year we were married (2 weeks after the wedding) and we had a new baby the following year, so no parties after that.  Once I got divorced, parties were out of the question (and the budget).  As the kids got older, I would invite some single (or want-to-be single) girlfriends over to scrapbook but now that the kids are grown and married, I'm back to babysitting!!  Life is truly a circle!

Zoey at midnite

Although Zoey's mom and dad didn't have big plans, they did invite 2 couples over to play games and cards, so I offered to take Zoey overnight so they could have a sleep-in.  Funny thing is, she always sleeps in at my house and never wakes up before 7:45 (at home, she wakes up about 6:30).  My daughter keeps asking for my secret, but I don't what it is - just that both my grandkids have always slept well here.

After putting my little sweetie to bed at 7 p.m., I heading to my sewing room for some Orca Bay sewing. I made good headway on those red strings and created a nice mess.

 Before I went upstairs to check on Zoey and welcome her into the New Year with a kiss (my secret tradition with every child I've been with on this special evening), I played with my Orca Bay pieces. 

I did have the white block surrounded in the same way, but....

Imagine my surprise when I checked my blog list at 12:03 a.m. my time.  Bonnie had surprised everyone with an early reveal!  I was so close on my guess - if only I had figured how those white blocks fit in!

So I played some more!  My design wall is too small to hold the full width but I'm liking it!  My goal is the top put together by the next Monday link-up.  Wish me luck!

A little late to the party, but I made good progress this week!

Even though I'm late joining Bonnie's linky-thingie, I'm pleased with my progress on my Orca Bay mystery quilt.  I had 4 days off with Christmas and Boxing Day, and I managed to get some sewing in every single day, plus this evening after work.  I only completed one block for Step 6:

Each week, I do at least one unit of the step so I can check for mistakes.  I really couldn't do more on this step, because I still had to finish Step 1, but I got that done on Saturday:

All 224 plus about 10 extra - I didn't think I cut that many extra!

Then I was able to sew up the rows for Step One's block.  First I cut the 56 red blocks and assembled the middle row, chain-piecing all the way:

I didn't get much done on Christmas Day, because I got to spend the day with these little sweeties. 

Zoey is now sitting up on her own, so she was able to enjoy her new toys!  Big cousin Alex loved showing her what to do with them - he is so good with her.  We only got to spend the morning with him and his parents, though.  They left at noon to head to New Zealand for two weeks, to visit his other grandparents.  I miss him already, as I get to see him almost every day.

On Monday, I worked more on Step 6.  First I did the rows ofwith the dark 2 1/2" squares:

And thought I had finished all the ones with the neutral squares, but knew something was wrong because I had a bunch of QTS's left over.  It was time to leave the house to go to a friend's for Boxing Day dinner, so I couldn't look to see where I went wrong.

I had almost all day yesterday to sew - adding up to about 12 hours of time in my sewing room.  There are advantages to being single and having grown children! 

I put aside Step 6 for a bit, and worked on finishing up Step 2. 

Alex had helped me take off the paper on the first batch on Saturday, and I got the remaining 36 finished yesterday.  I also created a lovely pile of clippings I'm going to turn into some crumb blocks, then I'll toss the rest.

Once I figured out I didn't cut enough neutral squares (whoops!), I finished the last of the rows for Step 6 and put them aside for pressing. Before I press the piles, I decided to work on Step 3, and press those at the same time.  Tonight I started sewing together my first 185 pairs of tiny triangles, and then I cut out the remaining 165 pairs, plus a good stack of dark triangles so I can work on Step 5.  Maybe I'll be caught up by this coming weekend, if Step 7 isn't too onerous!

So, my recap is:

Step 1 - complete

Step 2 - complete

Step 3 - 185 pairs sewn, 165 to go

Step 4 - 14 triangles done, 114 to go

Step 5 - 12 done, 338 to go

Step 6 - 1 block done, 165 rows sewn.  Need to be pressed and assembled.

Not too shabby, if I do say so myself!