Celtic Solstice: Denouement

Thanks to a once-in-a-lifetime series of circumstances -- specifically sniffly children occupied with post-holiday gifts and vacation television, a husband who cooks, a snowstorm followed by an Arctic cold snap preventing anyone from going out, a first-Friday sewing night, and NFL playoffs -- what was only three days ago a box stuffed with 3" patchwork units is now a completed, and rather large, quilt top.

Bonnie generously uploaded the final set of directions at midnight on New Year's Eve. (No, I did not get started right away!) I started mid-day on Wednesday, and had all of the blocks assembled by Friday morning. I took them with me to Lisa's on Friday night and came home with seven separate rows. After lunch today, I sewed the rows together (finished: 2:00 pm), cut the inner borders and attached those (3:30), stitched the pieced border triangles and attached those (5:30 pm), then got the outer borders on using strips of both yellow and green (because, you know, scrappy) by the middle of the fourth quarter of the first playoff game!

Celtic Solstice scrap quilt, 76 x 76"

Celtic Solstice: Week 5 units

Finished these Week 5 units in the nick of time for the Patriots game (go Pats!), and there's still another seven hours of football/sewing time! Woohoo!

I pieced these the regular rotary way, but I may consider using the special ruler if I ever find myself doing zillions of little triangles again...lots of the other mystery solvers seemed to find it very useful.

Cute little split-triangle units

Running total: 458 + 75 = 533. Maybe one more week of piecing before we start assembling the pieces? The homestretch is so exciting...

Check out the other posts at Bonnie's weekly link-up!

Celtic Solstice: Weeks Two, Three, and Four

Having now completed my Buddy-the-Elf I-got-a-full-forty-minutes-of-sleep! phase of the year, which included an unscheduled 500-mile drive to Pennsylvania for a really terrific family holiday and a football game (of all things), I actually have a few moments to try to catch back up with the Bonnie Hunter mystery quilt. It feels like the pieces are absolutely microscopic, but I think it's going to be a pretty neat quilt once it's all together.

The Week Two chevron units were devilishly grueling. Most of the time that it takes to cut 600 pieces involves ironing the heap of jumbled bits that are tossed into my color-sorted scrap bins. This is what the bins look like when I start:

Blech.

It took forever to tame the scraps into these little bits.

The directions for piecing these chevrons were very easy to follow, but the season being what it is, I only finished piecing and pressing the seams just this morning. I suppose they do look different than flying geese, but it bothered me that there was so much fabric waste. I will be interested to see the finished pattern so I can think about why they were pieced thusly instead of as twin sets of flying geese, which I can make with no waste.

Does it really matter??

Anyone want a pile of tiny triangles?

Finished chevron units. They're pretty, but time-consuming.

The Week Three diamonds didn't take nearly as long, although the Pittsburgh trip kept me from doing them right away.

Finished pinwheel units.

The fourth set of directions came out just before the final gift-stitchery weekend, so she made it pretty easy. Four patches? No problemo! These went together so quickly that I had time to catch up on the chevrons and finally take photos to get this post up for the Link-Up before the next set of directions is posted tomorrow.

120 four-patch units.

I love how all the colors of all these tiny pieces look stacked in their UFO box:

The collection of all the bits so far looks like a box of candy!

Math geekery: We need 625 3" units to make a 75 x 75" quilt. So far we have 96+92+100+50+120=458, which leaves 167 more units (although some of that area could be borders, which would throw off my calculations). What will tomorrow bring??

Celtic Solstice: Week One units

Cutting and stitching and pressing and trimming...these are a few of my favorite things... Actually, the trimming isn't that fun -- I can't trim 188 units in one evening, but I got the first 50 or so done tonight. That pace should have me ready for the next clue on Friday.

Here's what I've got so far (trimmed units on the board, scraggly units-in-waiting piled up in front):

Week 1 triangle-in-a-square units

This photo also gives a pretty true representation of the new color on the walls in the family room (which I, of course, think of as my "studio"). This is a really cheerful and well-lit place for making things! The color is called "Luscious Lips" which really cracks me up; it makes me think of this:

Now I really need to dive into Anna's "country music" journal page, which is hanging me up a little because I don't really like ANY modern country music, and I'm torn between kind of funny choices or more serious/artistic ones drawn from a previous generation of songs...

Celtic Solstice: A Bonnie Hunter Mystery

I had a lot of success with last year's mystery quilt (still unquilted, for those keeping score) that Bonnie Hunter provided, so what the heck -- I'll give this year's a try too. I really like the cheerful color palette that she chose:

Although the instructions specify a mix of print-on-white fabrics as the background of this quilt, I don't have a lot of those shirting-style fabrics (and I don't particularly like them), so instead I'm using a 2-yard cut of a great multicolored dot; all four of the paint chips looked really nice sitting on it:

The first "clue" came out this morning, and it was a doozy. I have been spending most of my time making quilts with really BIG pieces that showcase the awesome contemporary prints on the market these days, but this was the exact opposite. I'm considering it a chance to clear out some space in those ever-deepening scrap bins. Cutting all the little pieces for the first clue took over five (!) hours, and I still haven't started stitching the 188 units.

92 3.5" orange triangles -- so pretty in the morning sunshine!

These ones took forever - 188 pairs of blue side triangles

All 564 pieces fit neatly onto my little mat. The stacks of sorted blue triangles are fairly precariously balanced.

 Anyone else stitching along on this project?