Easy Street: Part 1

With all of my copious spare time, I am making a mystery quilt from Bonnie Hunter's Quiltville blog. She calls it "Easy Street" and claims it will be "less intense" than previous mysteries that she has offered. Sounds vaguely ominous, but tempting enough to dive in.

Although I absolutely love the colors she picked for this quilt (lime, turquoise, purple!!), I don't think I have enough to do an entire huge quilt in those colors. Instead, I chose a brown print that has been percolating up through my stash for several years. I have always loved this one, and it seemed like a good neutral to replace the grey in the Easy Street pattern.

The first set of directions was to make 194 four-patch units. Instead of black-and-whites, which I can never keep in stock here, I chopped up a bunch of light neutrals for my background:

It took a day to cut, sew, press, and recut the strips. I went to bed on Saturday night with an array of 384 pairs all lined up on my desk. I started the morning by sewing these together and hanging them on the wall.

Wouldn't this make a pretty holiday garland?

Sometime during the first round of NFL games, I harnessed the power of the little fingers in my household to cut these strings apart.

Sweatshop workers. I don't think I need to worry about them organizing.

 I hooked up the embroidery machine to work on some Super Secret projects and got to ironing. Boring! ...but everything looks so pretty when it's done.

Pretty fabrics, pretty patterns

And here they all, Step 1 all done!

I'm hedging on the main colors to use in this quilt. I do love the standard autumnal hues, but I just did an autumn quilt. Is there such a thing as autumn overload? If so, I haven't gotten there yet. I'm considering emerald greens and sapphire blues, with dark chocolate as the accent color (replacing the purple in the original), but I will wait and see what the next directions have before I commit. I still might use the original brights in a smaller version once I have a better idea of how to scale it down.