Magnolia Mystery Quilt
Every year, Cheryl at Meadow Mist Designs hosts a mystery quilt quilt-along. I made her 2015 quilt and regretted not making her 2016 quilt, so I was very excited to try my hand at the 2017 version, the Magnolia Mystery Quilt. I decided to go with a Christmas theme and use up some of the fabrics from my holiday stash.
October was a little more intense: half-flying geese blocks! Flying geese are my nemesis, but I used them as leaders and enders, trimming as I went along, so it didn't seem like as much work. This is where the mystery part of the quilt comes in handy - had I just looked at this pattern I probably wouldn't have made it just because of the sheer number of these blocks that I needed. But because I already had the fabric selected (July) and cut (August), I was committed to seeing it through!
Cheryl does a great job of laying out the requirements for the quilt, letting you know how much of each color you'll need and which fabrics touch each other. I decided to use red as my background with a light green, dark scrappy green, and red on white print. September started off with a lot of half-square triangles.
November started the actual assembly of the blocks. I had two different dark green blocks and had cut even numbers of each - they fit into the pattern beautifully! My oldest son saw me laying them out and fell in love with the "puzzle" of laying them out. He kept me going on sewing them together because he just kept laying them out next to my machine for me. I really, really liked how the blocks looked on-point and was hoping they would be that way in the final quilt.
I made about half of the blocks and then fizzled out as I started sewing for Christmas. December's final assembly instructions came out and I still let it sit. Finally, in mid-January I pulled it out and finished sewing all of the blocks (again with my son's help laying them out). When it came time to sew them together into larger blocks, I decided that I wanted the centers to be consistent so I pulled a third dark green from my stash to be the center of the blocks.
Assembly went quickly. I made two minor changes to Cheryl's pattern. First, I'm missing four of the partial units that go into the main area of the quilt. This was less a design decision and more of a running out of fabric decision. It was not Cheryl's fault - I was working from my stash and hoping to make the fabric stretch. I actually could have gotten three of the four made but it made more sense just to leave all four off.
Second, I decided to have the main area of the quilt be closer to the top instead of centered. I had enough of the red, backing fabric, and batting to make my quilt about ten inches longer than the pattern called for and I decided to just use it instead of adding it to my stash; besides, my husband prefers a longer quilt!
I decided I wanted an all-over geometric pattern on this quilt, so I had my local quilt shop quilt it for me.
The front made me think of poinsettias, so that's what I went with for the back of the quilt.
Then it was just a matter of watching the Olympics and hand-stitching the binding down. I'm so pleased with how this quilt turned out!
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