Merry Mayhem

Every year, I have a look at Merry Mayhem's New Year's Day mystery. Some years I jump in, other years not so much. This one was tough. It's very scrappy, with 3 unifying fabrics, and I find those a big challenge to deal with. But I had a box of precuts, that fit the cutting sizes for this quilt very nicely, so I decided to jump in with both feet.

As always, I wanted a charity quilt out of this, so I had to play around with her sizing. And I was working blind, because I wanted to know how many units to make up front, rather than going back and making more later.  This is were her method - cut *everything* up front - works out really well.  I decided that 48 was my number, and jumped into the cutting process before the holidays.

On New Year's Day, I worked through a lot of it, but got way behind pretty quickly due to the size of my quilt.  But, that's was group sew days are for :)  When I finished Bonnie Hunter, I took advantage of my Bonnie Sew Days to work on Merry Mayhem. And last weekend I finished it!  

A little advice from some friends and I swapped the original plan for sashing and borders, and it all came together.

Indigo Way

 Phew!  All the sewing on Bonnie Hunter's Indigo Way quilt is done!  I decided that my full-size version would be going to charity, so I split up the blocks into 2 quilts, each 50x70". 

The first one has Bonnie's border and is just a small version of hers, finishing at 48x"x72".

The second one, I took most of the remaining blocks, set them straight instead of on-point, and added borders, to make it 50x70".

And then I still had 4 blocks left, so I made a small quiltie for the children's hospital.

These are at the top of my "to be quilted" list, because I want to keep up with my finishes this year (prioritizing new finishes over my ancient UFOs, so I can see if I'm treading water here).

The final two blocks will be pockets for the bags that go with the Victoria's quilts donations. And then the final odds and sods are tucked into my scrap bins, to be used for future VQC pockets or other projects.

Mystery Weekend

I spent the weekend on a virtual quilt retreat with Quilt-agious quilt shop in Wisconsin. I love the creative patterns they come up with, and last year's retreat was so much fun I jumped in again.

Part of the retreat package was a new-to-me ruler - the Folded Corner Clipper by Creative Grids.  The pattern was designed around that, so we got lots of practice cutting and sewing clipped corners.

Short ones,

and tall ones,

Blocks were created.

And eventually, after 4 days, enough blocks for a start on a new quilt.  I kept up with the "minimum" recommendations, which allowed this sample to be viewed. I have more work to do to finish up the rest of the 12 blocks that make up the pattern.

As always, colour choice is tough for a mystery quilt. Plus, working from my stash is getting harder and harder, as I deplete my larger pieces of fabric.  I think the background is a bit busy here, but it'll have to do.

Let's see if I can avoid turning this into a multi-year UFO.

Indigo Way Progress

 I love Bonnie Hunter season! Every November she runs a free mystery, one clue a week until early January. The reveal came last week, so now the finishing begins.  I've been doing two this year - one with my in-person group and one with an online group. I did my first Bonnie Hunter Mystery (Orca Bay) back in 2011. But everything is better with friends, so I have been slowly converting various friends and guilds to build these groups 😄 

So my online mystery is a mini Indigo Way - each unit made 1/2 size, finishing at 1 1/2".  It is done, all the way to the borders. I considered adding a plain border, because I hate trying to bind where there are points I don't want to lose. But this quilt really doesn't want another border - I think that would somehow feel constrained.  So, here it is, ready for quilting. I think I'll bind it in one of the light greens.

This is one of my quilts from my large version of Indigo Way. I made all the blocks, in full size, in Bonnie's colours. But the results with be donated to Victoria's Quilts, so they need to be about 50x70". I have 1 done, 1 ready for borders, and some block pieces left over that I'll have to look at and see if there's a number 3 in there.  This is #2 - set square instead of on-point, because I don't feel like making more setting triangles 😂

One Block Wonder - Geese

 I love One Block Wonder quilts.  I made my first back in 2015, and I haven't looked back since.  At the end of this post is a list of the 10 I've made so far.  We won't talk about how many piles of fabric are in my cupboard, purchased for one block wonders.

However, I saw this goose panel on sale at a quilt shop, and thought it might make an interesting one block wonder.  It sat around for some time, and then my guild asked me to run a workshop on panel one block wonders.  This was a perfect sample to make for that class, so I pulled it out and started cutting.

Animals (and people) are tough. I don't like disembodied eyes and other body parts lying around my quilt.  But this one worked out fairly nicely. However, when I started laying it out, all the dark hexies from the geese themselves gave me trouble. They didn't blend around the edges at all.  Since I knew this would be a donation quilt, I ended up tossing those hexies aside, and working with the ones I liked better.  Unfortunately, I started cutting from the bottom right. Which mean that I lost almost all of the bright blue area of the panel - my final row was 1/2" short, and my triangles on the last full row were oriented such that I cut off most of the blue in the waste at the end of the row.  Poor planning on my part, I see now.  But also a good lesson to talk about in class :)

To deal with that, I dug some matching blue out of my stash, and the entire upper left of this quilt is strips cut from yardage, rather than hexies.  Two tone binding, to differentiate sky and grass, finished it off.  The quilt is about 48x70", and will be donated to Victoria's Quilts.

The leftover blocks could not go to waste.  So I put them up on the design wall, and came up with this design. It too is about 48x870" and will be heading off to Victoria's quilts.

I also made bags for each of them, since that's part of our donation process in the group I belong to.  I had a fat quarter of loon fabric which I thought was somewhat appropriate for the pockets on the bags for these two quilts.

1. Shells from Kaffe Fasset - 2014
2. Kaffe Fasset - Aug 2017
3. Mini one block wonder - 2018
4. Guild challenge OBW - 2019 
5. Butterfly Forest - 2019
   
6. Flower panel - 2019
7. Floral part 2 - 2019 
8. Paris - 2020?
   
9. Florence - 2021?
   
10. Canada Geese - 2024
11. Geese Remainders - 2024
    

Spinning Star

 My first real finish for 2024 (finishing 3 feet of binding, while productive, feels like a cheat to call it an actual UFO finish).  I started this project early on in the COVID lockdown, based on a pattern a friend showed me during a Skype session. The pattern was Hook by Schnibbles, and I merrily set about making a pile of hexies from a charm pack, with great intentions.  And then into the bin it went, to be steadfastly ignored whenever I was looking for a new project to work on.  Too many hexagons (I was in a One Block Wonder phase at the time).  

But, when we opened back up and started meeting in person again, I dragged it along to a few retreats. At the first couple, it was my fallback "if I run out of absolutely everything else, I might work on this".  Then at one retreat I actually did.  Not ran out, but ran out of interest for everything else I packed, so this one came out. Once I had all the hexies made, I actually enjoyed the process of figuring out a layout. The original one from the pattern was too much, I think because all of my hexies were pink.  It needed more colour variety. 

So I spread them out a bit, added some negative space, and created this project.  Used up the last of the fabric in the border and binding - and then realized that I had extra hexies set aside for a second quilt. Will have to finish that one up without any more of the pink, I guess.

I found some nice pink flannel for the back, but there wasn't quite enough.  After playing with options, I decided to go with the grey flannel, with a pop of pink instead.

This will head off to Victoria's Quilts this week.
 

Some charity projects from the past

Early on in the pandemic, Bonnie Hunter offered a quilt-along medallion quilt.  I jumped in, even thought I'm not 100% sold on medallion quilts. But I had all this leftover fabric from Frolic, that I needed to use somewhere. So I played along, and made some adjustments to come up with a donation sized quilt.

 

 And in the spirit of catching up my blog and quilt journal, this is a quilt that was made pre-pandemic in a block party.  Everyone made 1 block from fabric provided by me.  12 blocks, 1 charity quilt.  This pattern was found in a magazine that contained a number of different scrappy quilt patterns. The name of which has faded into the mists of time.