Thursday 11 November 2010

Quilters' Guild Mystery Quilt

Have finally got pictures and self together with regard to my mystery quilt.  This was a set of pattern instructions run over 4 editions of The Quilter, the Quilters' Guild quarterly magazine.  In the end I took so long I had all four issues by the time I got down to it but I did follow the instructions issue by issue, which caused its own issues when there were problems, but I got there.  I had good fun also doing a book of the quilt including why I chose my fabrics.

The mystery quilt instructions were to use 12 fabrics, 4 lights, 4 mediums and 4 darks, no stripes.  I decided on blues, as I now know from having to pay attention to and carefully choose my colours I am using soft warm blues.  My choice was partly indicated by some pretty blue and white Austrian dress fabric I had (think Heidi and Sound of Music), a lightweight cotton that I've always wanted to use, and a navy used for a pirate costume for Caitlin.  Also, blues remind me of my mother.  Blue has always suited her but even more so now her hair is a fine silver, and soft blue is like her personality, soft, quietly beautiful and warm.

The central panel is the diamond you can see here, I added a border of 6 by 1 and a half inch strips, due to the fact that the stripes on my leftover Austrain fabric ran the wrong way!  I then decided to add a double sawtooth border, 1 inch squares on the inside and 3 inch on the outside, which will look amazing but 64 large and 192 small squares later!  It will be worth the effort, and I'm very good at making half sqaure triangles using the method of sewing either side of a diagonal now...  I then laid all the squares out to try and make sure the same fabrics weren't too close together and carefully numbered them all and pinned them with pieces of paper, we'll see if it works!

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