Well, it feels like I have lost a full week. As mentioned in my last post I had health issues with a kidney stone and ended up in hospital last Saturday. Well, my troubles weren’t over. The stone decided not to pass quietly and I have ended up with a bladder infection. Needless to say not much quilting or anything else has been happening this week. The medication I am on makes me dizzy and drowsy. Oh well not much I can do about it. Just have to accept it and hope I get better sooner than later. I did manage to get the surprise quilt I am working on on the frame and the ditch quilting started. Hopefully I can manage to work on this for short time periods over the next few days as it needs to be finished and presented on Labour day weekend.
Yesterday Facebook came up with a memory (as Facebook does) and for me it was of a quilt I posted 2 years ago. This was a mystery quilt done at a quilting retreat. Has anyone ever done mystery quilts?
Mystery quilts are interesting. With mystery quilts you usually get just the yardage and colour value required. Like 12 fat quarters medium to dark value and 2 metres light. It is up to you to go from there. Bonnie Hunter puts out a mystery quilt that starts every American Thanksgiving. With Bonnie’s she actually gives her readers paint chip numbers from Lowes so anyone who wishes to can match the colours Bonnie uses in her mystery quilt.
Once you have picked your fabrics and the mystery starts you get a set of instructions and you go from there. You have no idea what the finished quilt is going to look like until the last part of the mystery is handed out and a picture of the quilt is revealed.
At first the control freak in me hated mystery quilts. I wanted to know what the end project would look like and always worried that I would make the wrong fabric choices. Now that I have learned to relax and trust my sense of colour and design more, I don’t find choosing fabrics for mystery quilts quite so daunting.
Here are some of the pictures from facebook that prompted this trip down memory lane.
As mentioned this quilt was produced at a quilting retreat so there was several of us working on this pattern at once. We were only told yardage and values required nothing else. It was really funny because as we all got to about Part 6 on this quilt we all were wondering what we got ourselves into. I may be remembering this wrong, but I think we all questioned whether we were all making the ugliest quilt top ever. However once we got the last part and put the quilt top together they all turned out beautifully.
I guess it’s sometimes like life, just when you wonder how on earth all of the pieces are going to work together something is revealed and everything falls into place.
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