Mystery Quilts part 2

There have been times when I hit what I like to call a dead spot in my quilting. I just don’t feel like working on anything I have started and I am not excited about starting something new. This is the best time for me to start a mystery. It gives me a challenge. A challenge to pull the correct fabrics, and the suspense of seeing where I am going with this quilt. It brings the excitement back into quilting.

The Bartered Quilt Mystery is probably the most basic mystery pattern that I have done. It is also my biggest disappointment! What was I thinking? When I pulled those fabrics? And you know what is even scarier? I hand quilted it. I learned a valuable lesson on this one. I used a busy background and it would have been much more pleasing if I had chosen a tone on tone for the background.

Frenz was a mystery gone bad that I tried to fix with a clever border. An online group (Frenz) I was on at the time did this 4 block center as a mystery. It called for 2 fabrics. I thought by using fabrics from my stash in the same color family I could get the same results. Unfortunately I lost the star design in the process. What could have turned out as another great 4 block quilt instead ended up as a big mish mash of nothingness. I did have fun piecing the letters.

The fairy quilt had a fabric miscalculation (my mistake) that I feel made this a better quilt. This mystery was in a magazine over a 3 month period of time. I bought fabrics specifically for this quilt since it was to be based on a theme fabric for the border. I went with the Flower Fairy fabrics since it was also to be my daughter’s age 9 quilt (another story for another time). I purchased all the fabrics together out of this line and didn’t realize until I went to cut it out that I had flipped the background and medium fabric requirements around. Now I no longer had a white background. But I like how the pink turned out and call it a happy mistake.