Crackpot Quilters’ Blog

In fact, it’s the Mystery Quilt, instructions for which were published in Quiltmaker beginning in the Jan/Feb 2007 issue. Crackpots may remember that Cathy started all this with her post in Nov., 2006 when she announced that she was planning to work on the mystery quilt and showed us her palette. Then I joined in. As I said way back then, I generally think mystery quilts are dumb. Why commit yourself to a whole lot of work on a project when you don’t know what you will end up with? But Cathy suckered me in. I thought – and still think – that it would be cool to have two Crackpots work on the same quilt and see how different they would be when finished. If you go back to our earlier posts, you will see that Cathy and I did indeed come up with very different blocks using the same instructions but our own unique choices of fabric. But the posts, and the efforts, petered out with the last post being from Cathy in July 2007. Cathy had the very good excuse of a certain adorable small James for putting her mystery quilt on the back burner, but I have none, except, of course, of having the responsibility of being grandmother to the aforementioned James.
But then shortly after Christmas, as I was planning and packing for a visit to the Cute Little House, I was looking through my various quilting UFOs trying to decide what I wanted to take with me to work on and I came across the plastic shoe box with the bits and pieces and fabrics for the mystery quilt. Despite higher priority projects, something in it called to me, and I took it along. Soon I was hooked. And here you see the result. I like it!!
Now all I have to do is layer and quilt it. It will be machine quilted in the ditch and shadow quilted. I’m not about to take on the task of learning free-motion quilting to quilt it as recommended in Quiltmaker. The current plan is to hang it over the couch in the Cute Little House. I just hope I can keep up the momentum.

So, I thought I was actually getting caught up from being behind in Quiltmaker’s Mystery Quilt series, when I finished these two blocks and was only one block behind. Then the very next day, the next issue of Quiltmaker arrived, with the final installment in the series! So I’m still behind, and not likely to catch up any time soon. Anyway, here are my most recent blocks:

This block was hand-pieced, because I was working on it at Goshorn Lake and it seemed easier to just do it by hand than bother with setting up a sewing machine. I was also able to work on it a bit in between doctors’ appointments at the clinic, which earned me some smiles and approving glances from the older ladies walking through.

This block is done entirely with templates, which is fine, but I can’t imagine doing a whole bed-sized quilt this way! All of the tracing and cutting for just this one block got to be a pain in the neck. But I like how it turned out. Here are all of the parts of the Mystery Quilt so far:

As you all can see, I had a productive 5 days last week at the Cute Little House. With help from Marty and the extensive stock at Fields, I was able to extend my palette and produce the following:

I like it. As you can see, it is quite different from Cathy’s. Actually I think I like Cathy’s better. Her blues and reds are more my usual style. But it is good for us to branch out and extend our range of palettes. Also, you will note that I have followed Cathy’s lead and photographed my blocks on a hardwood floor background. I think it has a warmer, richer look than the plain white sheet I have been using in previous photos.

My new Quiltmaker arrived yesterday. The next two blocks are large complex ones. I have not yet studied them closely, but they look interesting. Possibly a project for the next CLH trip.

So the latest issue of Quiltmaker came out recently, with the next installment of the Mystery Quilt, four six-inch blocks of different flower designs. I have to admit, I was a little disappointed, since I don’t much care for flower blocks, but oh well.

Here are my renditions of the four new blocks, with the original block in the center:

Clockwise from upper left, they are Ruby Slipper, Trumpets of Spring, Dutch Touch (this one is foundation-pieced), and Log Cabin Star. Trumpets of Spring was hard – there are set-in seams and seams that have to turn corners in the piecing of this one, and they don’t really give you any guidance or tips on how to make the piecing work. Also, the directions for Ruby Slipper contain a typo; under “Assorted spring prints” where it says “(1 from each of 3 fabrics)” they really mean “(1 from each of 4 fabrics).”

This post could be subtitled: Rotational Symmetry Makes My Brain Hurt.

So a couple of weekends ago, I pieced the first block in the Mystery Quilt project. It went together pretty well, once I remembered about corner trimming templates for piecing triangles. The results are shown below:

There’s only one hitch: if you look closely at the quarter-square triangles in the corners of the block (the light and dark green patches), you’ll see that they’re not rotationally symmetrical. Thanks to the magic of Photoshop, I can show you what I mean. Here, again, is the block as I pieced it, and the block as displayed in Quiltmaker:

|

I followed the instructions given in Quiltmaker, but because of the way that the block is assembled at the very end — it’s made up of four triangular sections, sewn on the diagonal — there’s no way to get all four corners rotationally symmetrical without making twice as many quarter-square triangle units and using only half of them. I didn’t have a huge amount of the green fabrics, and I wanted to be able to use them for other parts of the quilt, rather than throw them out. So I was faced with a choice:

• Disassemble the block, sew a bunch more quarter-square triangle units, and re-assemble it, hoping that I wouldn’t need much more of the green fabrics later on, or
• Leave the block as is, and hope that the perfect rotational symmetry of the block isn’t critical to the design of the quilt as a whole.

I chose the latter (for now), though I’m having second thoughts. Unfortunately, because of the way the block is assembled, if I decide to go back and re-do the block, I’ll have to disassemble the whole thing, which will be a pretty big pain in the neck.

So what do y’all think?

Also, Ann says below in her comment that she’s joining in the project – yay! I can’t wait to see her palette of fabrics!

As I mentioned to some of you at Thanksgiving, Quiltmaker magazine has a new Mystery Quilt series starting in the current (January/February) issue and going through the next five issues. I will admit that I’ve been becoming less and less inspired by the designs in Quiltmaker — I’m not sure if this is because their designs are getting objectively less interesting, or whether it’s because my tastes are growing in a different direction — but I’m intrigued by this idea.

(I’ll also admit that about 80% of my intrigue is because of the beautiful palette of fabrics they’ve picked for their rendition of the quilt, another 10% is the coolness of the first block, and the remaining 10% is because I love a surprise.)

It’s very difficult to select fabrics for a quilt whose design is a secret when you start, but the whole quilt is done in tone-on-tone fabrics of varying values, which makes it a little easier. I bought a few fabrics over the holiday weekend, and supplemented with fat quarters and various scraps from my stash:

Only five of these fabrics are newly-purchased. My early stash-building strategy was (unbeknownst to me) heavily oriented toward tone-on-tones, so there are a lot of fabrics in here that I bought long ago. Also, you may not be able to tell from the photo, but there are leftovers from at least four different projects in there, including two baby quilts. (!) I still need to purchase some longer yardages of very light and very dark fabric, but this is a start. Anyone care to join me in the project?