This weekend has been one of Jessamy's mysteries, I decided to join in, I've never done a mystery quilt before and I quite fancied having a go.
I bought fabric as I liked her colour suggestions, firey, orange, yellow and red, of which I had none in stash, here's where I went wrong, I forgot to add yardage for borders, so although I only bought in multiples of 1/2 yard, I had little spare.
The cutting requirements had some 7.5 inch strips in it, I do not like cutting wide strips, I'm much more likely to go wrong and if I do go wrong, there is less likely to be enough fabric to rectify it. Unfortunately I did go wrong, whilst cutting through 2 widths of the fabric, not just one, and I didn't notice until the end, after I'd cut my narrower strips!
I pressed on, as I figured I was probably going to have to go shopping for border fabric, so I could get the extra bit I needed.
It was an intriguing mystery as we had 7.5inch squares with a line drawn, they were obviously initially going to be HST squares, but we also had 3.5 inch HSTs and 4.5 inch HSTs cut, as well as different width strips that I guessed were for strip piecing.
In one of the later parts, the large HST squares suddenly got cut up into tiny pieces, then got turned into an ohio star with the middle square having seams in it and another block with the a pinwheel in the middle - this was a shining light for me, I should be able to get these little pieces out of my fabric with a little extra work.
Before the last part arrived it was still all a mystery, we had blocks and half blocks of 6.5 inches and a few odd squares of 3.5 inches, but also an
8.5 inch block, how could they all go together? Well they didn't, the blocks, half blocks and squares make up a gorgeous nested stars top and the other blocks go together to make another top, this was good news for me, the 2nd top only requires bits from what I messed up, so I have less fiddly stuff to finish the first top and the 2nd one can just be a bit smaller, I'm not going to use it as a backing!I may still have to shop again for border fabric, but I may be able to do that locally, rather than having to trek back to the original shop.
So, what did I learn? Check the fabric requirements, I'd calculated them myself from the cutting instructions, before Jessamy provided them, but I didn't cross check. Also, buy extra fabric, this was stuff I would definitely use, so I don't know why I didn't! I'll also put a wider 24inch ruler on my wish list, I have the standard 6 inch, but you do sometimes need wider strips and I don't like using the cutting mat to measure, it seems to go wrong for me far too often. I was pleased with how my piecing went, the fiddly ones aren't perfect, but it's mostly only one junction off, out of
12ish and they were small, I don't think I'd have done it that well 3mths ago. I need to figure out whether a quarter inch foot would help me, I can do quarter inch seams and it seems a lot of the time you wouldn't be able to use the special foot, like when going parallel to a marked line, I've also heard they tend to catch triangle ends, but I think it might help when pulling a load of tiny patches together.I didn't get it finished in the weekend, I knew I wouldn't, we had a garage sale yesterday and two small kids running around, I hope to finish by when my shopping arrives Tuesday morning, if I don't, it will be a while as online groceries arriving marks the start of a marathon cooking session. I'll post pictures asap.
Anne