Another Quiltville Mystery solved!

JOINING MR. PEABODY IN THE WAY-BACK MACHINE

Hello!  After an on-lie absence of two years (!!!), I am finally resuming my quilty posts.  I'm not sure why I've been hibernating.  In part it's been because I've been busy sewing, without actually finishing much.  In part it's been because I've been less than thrilled with the results of my endeavors. Often I neglecged to take photos, which are the heart of my quilting diary.  And I've let myself get distracted by useless wastes of time (e.g., online jigsaw puzzles).  Whatever.  I guess most quilters sometimes have days, weeks, even months when they just can't get their mojo going.  At least I was sewing, just dropped the posting. 

2021-2023:  Rhododendron Trail

Every November, Bonnie Hunter at Quiltville.com comes up with another amazing mystery quilt project.  How she manages to write a daily blog, host groups of quilters in her Quiltville Inn, write books and magazine columns, and still design, stitch, and quilt so many quilts is beyond me.  I'd completed two of her mystery quilts, but didn't embark on them until after the Reveal, so I knew what I'd be making.  In 2021, I threw caution to the winds and started right off when the mystery, called Rhododendron Trail, started.   I should have known I was in trouble when the second clue was to make 124 flying geese.  Eeek!

After all that, I didn't even use them until the very last step in the project!  But no worries, there were plenty more triangles to do.  There were triangles sewed to half-square triangles.

Which of these things is not like the others?

There were quarter-square triangles.

There were great, big triangles.

Of course, there were plenty of squares and rectangles, too.  And then there was the sashing that finished at 1/2". 

I found this quilt to be challenging, in the cutting as well as the sewing.  Normally I enjoy a challenge, but more than a year later, when I finally finished the quilt top, I didn't really like it.   Many of my friends did liked it, but not I.  I think it was the color combinations.  Maybe that's part of why I stopped blogging in 2023?).

Bonnie Hunter's patterns are very well written.  She is a teacher, and it shows in the details she gives in explaining not only how, but WHY, to do things.  And in this experience I did learn an important thing about reading the mystery directions.  In the introductory post, she shows the colors that she has used and how much yardage to buy if you are not doing the quilt scrappy.  I've done all 3 of her quilts scrappy, but the thing I hadn't considered was that by reading the yardage amounts, I'd have had an idea before beginning about the proportions of each color that will be in the quilt.  If I'd read the yardage directions, I'd have known that there was going to be a lot of pink and hardly any teal.   I think I would have liked this quilt a lot more if I'd altered how each color was used, and maybe even swapped some out.  Lesson learned.

More on Rhododendron Trail in thek next post.