This month marks the start of two fun new projects for me. The Star Light Star Dark Quilt Along with Jessica of Quilty Habit and Meadow Mystery, a mystery quilt with Cheryl of Meadow Mist Designs.

Jessica’s Star Light Star Dark is an exercise in different values of the same color. She’s offering a 3-color lap quilt or 2-color baby quilt option for the quilt along. I’ve chosen the hybrid 3-color baby quilt. ;-) I started with purple, the most abundant color in my stash. I had a reasonably easy time pulling a variety of values of purple fabric. For my “second color” I struggled to find a range of values in any one color, so I decided to go with yellow and orange. This afforded me the ability to pull all the fabrics from my stash for this project. Yay! Below are my fabrics: light yellows/orange, dark yellow/oranges, dark purples, and light purples. You can better see the values in the black and white photo below it.

 

This is my second online mystery quilt with Cheryl. I did the Midnight Mystery quilt last year. The requirements just came out for our five fabrics for the Meadow Mystery quilt. She indicated by value what we needed. Last year my colors and fabrics chosen for my quilt were both driven by my stash. Generally I stash half yard cuts of fabric, so I went scrappy to fulfill each color requirement. This year, I decided to pull fabrics from my larger cuts first, since those options are minimal in my stash. I picked the white tone on tone for my background fabric since I had a bunch of it from a project I decided to go another way on. Then I chose the butterflies, which ironically, were a castoff from an earlier stage of that same old project, what became the Purple Ninjas quilt.

This left me with needing a half yard of a medium value, and 1 yard each of a dark and a light to medium. I was able to find the other fabrics in my stash. I may need a bit more of the Kona solid than I have on hand. I’ll also pick up more of the multicolored print (Mosaic in Glacier by Tula Pink), since I really love it and I haven’t decided if I’ll try to fussy cut to avoid the darkest portions or not. For those of you participating in the mystery quilt, I’ve labeled my photos with the letters corresponding to the pattern. (Sorry they aren't in order.) :-) Once again, I have a black and white version of the photo below to better show the values of the fabrics.

So much for working outside of my favorite color, but I’m excited to see how these project both shape up.

I finished 5 projects off my Q2 goal list. And one of them was a whopping 36" x 48". That said, I look at this list and I have made significant progress on at least six of my larger sized projects. It was a productive quarter, even if the finishes don't exactly represent all I've accomplished. I'm adding six new projects to the list. A couple small quilts to be given as gifts, helping my daughter finish her first quilt, two new quilt alongs and my bee quilt.

My six new projects are added at the top of this list. It's so hard for me to prioritize (so the list isn't otherwise in any particular order), but I have three that are gifts I'd like to give in the next month, plus helping my kids to finish their quilts while they are on summer break. I guess those are the short term priorities. :-)

Quilts

1. Baby quilt. I've drafted the pattern and picked out the fabrics, but no pics to show yet.
2. Race Car quilt. Again, I've drafted the pattern and chosen some fabric, namely the race cars and related blenders.
3. In the Middle quilt. 12 bee blocks so far from The Bee Hive #beehiveswarmtisha.
4. Star Light Star Dark. With Quilty Habit. Join us!
5. Meadow Mystery. With Meadow Mist Designs. Join us!
6. Help my 4-year-old daughter finish Rainbow Swift 2 (named after Rainbow Swift that her brother made for her), her first quilt. She's started quilting it.
7. Help my nearly 6-year-old son finish his latest quilt, a twin sized bed quilt for his sister. He's still piecing it, and I think we've decided to send it out for quilting.
8. Ocean quilt for my daughter. Need to make a second attempt attaching fish and hope my fabric doesn't bleed again.
9. Midnight Mystery Quilt. Finished Quilt top. 
10. 2004 Baseball Quilt. Quilt top is done and I've had my brother "try it on" (he's 6'5"). Now to finish it.
11. Color Strata Quilt. My stratas are made. New up I need to  figure out how I'll set it. 
12. Cotton & Steel (and low volume) HST Quilt.
13. Patchwork City Metro Area Quilt. 
14. Little Letters in Blues/Greens Quilt. I might need to change gears on these two to make them faster finishes.
15. Little Letters in Brights Quilt.
16. Very Hungry Caterpillar baby quilt. Quilt top finished.
17. Very Hungry Caterpillar small lap quilt. Quilt top finished.
18. Very Hungry Caterpillar twin quilt. Quilt top is complete, backing fabric is washed. I need to piece the backing. Somehow I don't have a picture of this one. Just look at #14 and think "twin sized."
19. Batik SCVQA philanthropy quilt. I just need to quilt it.
20. Roman Stripez with butterfly backing. Some blocks done. (see #21)
21. 2nd Roman Stripez.
22. Memory House Vol. 1 Quilt (2 houses complete) 
23. Swoon Quilt. 
24. Primary mini quilt. Same pattern as my Cotton & Steel mini swap. Hoping to get better at adding those bias edge triangles to finish it. 
25. Rainbow Chain. The pattern is Autumn Chain from The Bee Hive quilts. 
26. My Floating Squares improv project. (from The Improv Handbook for Modern Quilters by Sherri Lynn Wood.)
27. Creative HST project from Jeni Baker's class at QuiltCon. I'm close to 144 units. Here's my latest photo of the group of them.
    
28. Rainbow Remix from Rebecca Bryan's class at Quiltcon. Blocks are all done. Next up, the big job of piecing together irregular blocks.
29. Wonky Cross quilt from Rossie Hutchinson's class at QuiltCon. I added a second palette of fabric that I thought worked with the first. Here are the blocks I've completed so far.
30. Quartered Log Cabin quilt from Rossie Hutchinson's class at QuiltCon. 
31. Purple Royalty quilt. 

Other Sewing

1. Zippered Pouch with my EPP hexies from Johanna Masko's EPP class at QuiltCon.
2. Frog shirt for my son. Bowling Shirt (pattern by Scientific Seamstress). 
3. Winnie the Pooh Skirt/Shorts for my daughter.

 

Stats: I love data. I think I'll try to start showing the following graphically, buy I think it's a great metric for seeing my progress and not feeling like my lengthy WIP list is solely a bunch of languishing, forgotten projects. Those 20 that are in progress... many are much farther along. I promise.

• Planning Stages (pre-fabric pull): 4 (Q1), 0 (Q2), 2 (Q3)
• Fabric Pulled: 1 (Q1), 1 (Q2), 2 (Q3)
• Fabric Cut: 1 (Q1), 0 (Q2), 0 (Q3)
• Piecing in Progress: 15 (Q1), 20 (Q2), 20 (Q3)
• Quilt Top Completed: 7 (Q1), 9 (Q2), 7 (Q3)
• Quilted: 0 (Q1), 0 (Q2), 0 (Q3)

Bucket List: Because I need more projects, right?

1. Triangle Squared quilt.
2. Equilateral triangle quilt, perhaps Chopsticks pattern.
3. Raspberry Kiss lap quilt.
4. Technicolor Galaxy.
5. Polaroid quilt.
6. Chopsticks quilt.
7. Pirate Quilt. (I have fabric, but no firm plan on design yet.)
8. Leah Day's Dancing Butterflies to develop my free motion quilting. (I joined, but never... um... started.)
9. More Mini Mini Quilt Swaps on IG.

I'm linking up to the Q3 Finish-A-Long. Thank you to all the co-hosts for this year! I'm very thankful for Finish-A-Long helping me stay organized and motivated.

Thank you for visiting!