Monday, March 13, 2006

Project Spectrum II or mystery quilts

I told you the material I bought last week was green and yellow. Well, some of it was pink:


It's for a mystery quilt which started in April's Popular Patchwork, a British patchwork magazine that does not appear to have a web presence. I've wanted to do a mystery quilt for ages, but this is the first time I've been able to start at the beginning.

You don't get shown the overall design of the quilt you are making: it works like this:


  1. You get told what material to buy, and what shapes to cut it into.
  2. You get told how to sew some of the shapes together
  3. You get told how to sew the combined shapes together

    ......Repeat until
  4. You get told how to finish the quilt


It isn't until you get to the end that you see the final design. Usually I find out about them at the last part, where the mystery is solved. No fun in that!

This time, I bought the magazine with the first part in it. Before I bought the material for the mystery quilt I made myself finish all the leaves for the "New Hampshire Autumn/Fall" quilt I am making (from a different magazine). They aren't sewn together, of course.

I took the magazine with me to the quilt shop, looking for a material with a pattern. I ended up with cabbages - "market cabbages" which is a fairly new print from Makeower. It is predominately green with some yellow veining on the leaves, and some pink as well. Material B was another pattern, Material E was a dark colour, the same as in B, materials C and D were mid and light yellow. Finally, material F was a neutral colour, possibly tone on tone:


I've spent the last few days cutting pieces out, and trying to work out what it will look like. There are lots of 3 7/8 inch squares(no metric for quilters), which implies they are going to be half square triangles - that is a triangle formed from cutting a square in half. The patterns each have two 6 1/2 inch squares, probably for feature squares etc.

The May issue comes out on March 17th - Friday. I want to get the other pieces cut out first, and then see about sewing them up.

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