Throwback Thursday: Midnight Mystery Quilt

Now that the rush of preparing for the quilt show and making two baby quilts (one and two) is over, I'm filling my calendar up with new quilt-alongs. I was looking for a photo of the first mystery quilt-along that I did for an Instagram post and realized that it pre-dates my blog.  So today I present to you, the Midnight Mystery Quilt!

My love of quilt-alongs started early, and while this wasn't the first one that I ever did, it was the first mystery one.  I started it in July of 2015 and finished it in March of 2016.  According to my official quilt tracking spreadsheet, it is the 38th quilt that I ever started.  I remember reading the fabric requirements and instantly deciding that I wanted to use both pink and orange fabrics and then just going for it, but not much else about the actual construction process or how I picked the final fabrics.

It's also one of the first quilts that I quilted myself and this photo of the back shows some of the custom quilting I did.  I remember when I got to the blue sections my pattern wasn't fitting right - that's when I realized that the top and bottom sections on the middle column were sewn in upside down.  At that point, I was already many hours and buried threads into quilting that quilt and I just let it go.  Today, this quilt is a favorite of my son's and the upside down blocks don't bother him a single bit!

Have you ever made a mystery quilt?  I've made several and it's fun to see the design come together when you don't know exactly what you are making.  I don't participate every year, but here are the other three I've made with Cheryl's patterns:

Magnolia Mystery Quilt August 2017 - February 2018

Morewood Mystery Quilt September 2020 - March 2021

Macaron Mystery Quilt October 2021 - April 2022

Not only am I participating this year, I'm also one of the sponsors!  This year's quilt is called the Marble Mystery Quilt and I'm going for a gray and teal theme.

If you are interested in joining in, there's still plenty of time to get started.  The fabric requirements were released this month and the cutting instructions will be released next week.  I'm not a big fan of pre-cutting my fabric so this pretty stack of fabrics will probably sit until the first set of assembly instructions in October.  All of the details can be found on the Marble Mystery info page and who knows, maybe when your beautiful top is done you can win some of my patterns (there should even be some new ones by the time the quilt-along ends!).