I’ve decided to do the Midnight Mystery Quilt-a-long by Meadow Mist Designs. I’m starting a little late (seeing as it’s August and it started in June) but it seems to be okay since the first two months were just picking fabric and cutting it. I actually found out about it in June, but I was having a heck of a time deciding what fabrics to use.
I finally decided to use this as a scrap busting project. I needed about 2 yards of some of the fabrics, so it had to be large scraps. Well, I’ve made several quilts recently and used wide fabric for the backing. Since they were mostly lap quilts, I had lots of backing left over. Random pieces that I figured I’d use in a quilt eventually . . . why not this quilt? So yeah, this quilt is turning out to be a total stash buster!
The fabrics aren’t in any particular order, but for those curious, top to bottom, they are D, B, A, C. The gray is the backing for my Bright Squares quilt, the black is the backing for my Crazy 9 Patch quilt, and the aqua is from a quilt that I’m finishing up the binding on. The white is leftover fabric from my neon squares quilt (which is still in progress — soon, soon).
Cutting actually took way longer than I was expecting it to. I think this was due to the fact that many of my scraps were weirdly shaped so I had to cut out a lot pieces one at a time as I tried to line up the scraps along the grain.
But I finally did it. The pieces are A (white), B (aqua), C (black and purple), D (gray). You may be thinking to yourself, “Hey, wait, why is that purple there? I thought this quilt only called for 4 colors.” You would be correct. However, I didn’t have as much of the black as I thought I did. I had enough to get almost all of the pieces out of it, but was missing the 4” squares. I certainly have some plain black fabric, but I had this purple leftover in my stash (from a dog costume that I have yet to post) and I figured it would add a little interest to the quilt since the other colors were pretty but rather neutral.
I’ve also been saving the scraps that are inevitable when cutting strips and trimming them into 2” wide strips that I plan to piece together to use for binding at the end!
The August instructions start in on the sewing and I plan to get that done before the end of August and then I’ll be right on track. The quilt itself should be done in March of 2016. Talk about delayed gratification 🙂
