I'm participating in Cheryl's Meadow Mystery quilt along. By "participating" I've been mostly "watching everyone else make progress sewing for the past 3 1/2 months while I do nothing."
In September, when the first sewing instructions came out, I cut out all my fabric (only a month behind schedule). This week I finally sewed some of that fabric together. So far, I've finished the September, October, and November sewing steps. And I'm about a third of the way done with the December sewing. With any luck I'll finish those blocks up today and switch gears to a couple free motion quilting projects that I'd like to finish in the next week or so.
First, September's instructions were all about HSTs. I made 56 HSTs using the two-at-a-time method. 32 of them went together in these four colorful blocks and the other 24 (butterflies/white, not all shown) were awaiting further instruction. I'm so pleased with having chosen the Tula print for the variations in color it brings to the project. My last mystery quilt was scrappy for each set of fabric. This time I stuck to one fabric for each set, but this print brings a bit of that scrappy quality that I love.
October's instructions were to make all the hourglass and half hourglass blocks (52 total!). You can better see here that my white is actually a white on white print with small flowers.
November's instructions were to create the 16 flying geese and 16 square in a square units. I'm a little concerned that my square in a square units don't quite have a quarter inch seam allowance off all the points. Hopefully I don't lose too many points from my inner squares once these are pieced into larger units. I totally could have ripped out all my stitching before I trimmed them so that I could fix my seam allowance, but it seems this was one of those "done is better than perfect" moments. ;-)
Today I used a bunch of those units from September and October's sewing to start making these blocks. There are nine in all to make in December. I have three more to sew of each of the top blocks. I had all nine blocks up on the design wall and what stood out to me is that this quilt is going to be a lot of white. Perhaps that should have been apparent when there were 2 1/4 yards of my white fabric and 3 1/4 yards of my four other fabrics combined. But it didn't really hit me until today. I have never made a quilt with so much white fabric. That said, I'm excited to see it coming together. I'm eager to see what January holds for this project. It's feeling great to be nearly caught up. Note to self: start piecing the backing fabric. I think I'll use remnants of these fabrics and other purples.
