Mystery Quilt

Each year, the guild I belong to down in North Carolina has a mystery quilt where we get clues once a month for several months and then have a "reveal" in December. I have enjoyed doing these.  For those not familiar with the concept, you are given a menu of what value fabric you are to get as well as how much you will need.  Then you get cutting instructions and then each month, you get some piecing instructions but you never know until the last month how this will all go together.  This year's called for so many different fabrics, I was very hesitant to go my usual scrappy way but did as much as I could. 

These are the first two blocks I finished along with the secondary blocks (the x's) that we did a couple o months ago. You can see there is very little difference between the two blocks and they should look quite a bit different. The last step was adding those middle squares, all of the same fabric.  I ended up taking the one on the right apart and changing the middle fabric to a green so that they would be a little more different.  Don't know whether I did something wrong as I was going along or not  They should have looked quite a bit different from a value standpoint.

Here you can see those center 4 blocks and the darker one on the far right on the outside.  This will be the layout of the quilt.  I used nothing but fabrics from my stash including some scraps I had from backing a quilt as well as a bit of my hand dyes.  

At this point, I decided to see how the borders would look and put one set up on the design wall.  Well, the two borders go well together but don't look at all good with the rest of the quilt.  The focus fabric is more a blue-purple whereas the other purples are more of a red-purple and the green in the border fabric is a blue-green while in the quilt, the green definitely tends more to yellow.  Ugh, so now to find a fabric that works and undo the whole set of borders.  I saw no point in making a ugly quilt just to follow the directions!!

Well, after much searching, I did find a fabric that I liked better and luckily had enough of to work with.  Here you can see that I have decided to replace the inner border fabric as well.  This was the second set of strips I had cut up and it still didn't work for me!

I finally went back to the fabrics I had picked out for the quilt and found some leftovers from the secondary blocks and like the three bears, this one seemed just right!  It was a scrap from a backing fabric, so it had the added benefit of being extra long so I didn't have to piece the border.  I think overall the biggest problem I had with the borders was that I very very rarely would include a fabric in the border that didn't occur somewhere else in the quilt.

Well, off to sew this altogether and decide if I want to add another deep purple border to the outside.  I will definitely be doing some quilting with dark purple thread in those white squares on the outside -- probably some kind of flower.  Stay tuned!!