Wednesday, November 26, 2014

The mystery starts again!

I'm very excited about this year's mystery Grand Illusion (click here to see what all the hub-bub is about!)  I've been wanting to make a quilt with pink in it for a while. My pink stash is getting out of control!

With that said, when reading Bonnie's initial Grand Illusion blog post, she mentioned folks who post their own process, step by step, with measurements and counts. I went back and checked my old posts and I found that I did reference these things, so I took down all my posts from last year and the year before. It never occurred to me that folks could use my posts to reverse engineer the quilt pattern once it was taken down from Bonnie's site.  It was just my over-exuberance to share my experience.

This year I'll make sure to keep measurements, counts, or any step by step instructions out of my posts to avoid any concerns.  The last thing I want is to negatively impact Bonnie who gives so much to the quilt world!

In preparation for this year's mystery, I thought I would post my results from the last two years.


This was my first Bonnie Hunter Mystery Quilt - Easy Street.  I called it "The Big Easy Street" due to my use of Mardi Gras colors.  I swapped out her aqua for yellow.

Although I like the quilt in general I was a bit disappointed with my selection of background fabric.  You loose the design because the solid gray is too similar to many of the "black on white" prints when viewed from afar.  Lesson learned and this quilt is at my in-law's house.  They love it!

Last year I tackled Celtic Solstice.


These piles turned into THIS!



Some up close pictures.....




This quilt was a gift for my sister, and not only does she love it, so do two of her fur-babies, Abby and Sophie...




My recent projects are more baby quilt related.  I am involved in a quilt group at my local library and we did a fabric exchange/challenge.  We had 17 participants and everyone brought in at least 16 pieces of fabric from their stash (all different) at a size of 7"X7" or larger.  Everyone had to pick one fabric from everyone else's pile of scraps and make something out of it, augmenting with your own stash if you want.   I made a baby quilt using the fabrics below.


I took a page out of Bonnie's Wonky Wishes quilt and used the owl faces as the focus.


This is the resulting quilt.


This is due at the January meeting where we all show our projects!  

In the meantime, I actually needed another quilt for friend who is expecting so I went rummaging and found some really cool elephant fabric and some matching brights to make this!


It still needs binding but I'm hoping to finish that up today because.....FRIDAY IS TWO DAYS AWAY!


I'm ready to go!  I am also preparing to make some progress on some longstanding Leader/Ender projects, alongside of Grand Illusion.  

Star Struck (Free Bonnie Hunter Pattern here)  I have about 50-60 blocks done and I need 80.  I always loved the secondary pattern of the red hourglass in this design.


And from her book, Adventures with Leaders & Enders, Blue Ridge Beauty!  


So I'm ready go for the next 6-8 Fridays!  Are you sewing along with the rest of us nut-jobs?  If you're on the fence, jump in!  The water's fine.

Jen in IL