Quiltbug.com Superbowl Sunday mystery quilt. . .

.   .   .more or less.  I made a minor change with the sashing and the corner triangles to make those little starry crosses at the sashing intersections.  Pretty cute design.  The brown diamonds are machine appliqued with fusible and a small machine blanket stitch.  I never liked that method because old fusible was so stiff but Steam a Seam 2 is much lighter and more flexible.  All in all, a pretty good lap quilt.

Bias nightmares

Here is the EQ representation of a quilt I am making. I mentioned it before Christmas, I think. It came from a Marsha McCloskey book "Quick Classic Quilts". Classic I will give her, but quick? I think not. I am quite frankly in bias hell. And with all those triangles to join, I find myself marking the intersections at each and every corner. Oh, it's not pretty, people.

And there's no love around here for this little beauty. My husband pronounced it "another brown quilt". Au contraire, my dear, it is tan with a rose trumpet vine design, and 30 different rose colored Ohio star blocks. Brown it ain't. And I think it's cute as a button. Stand by for more later.

On another front, I delivered my second (see, I told you I was crazy) Quiltville Carolina Christmas mystery quilt to the longarm quilter last Wednesday. This one was arranged per Bonnie Hunter's original plan, and frankly copied from the color choices of one Ms. Caroline Van Maele of Belgium, who posted such luscious pictures I had to make one. The first was bed size (gigantic bed size) but this is a smaller version. I was going to make a half-scale version but the small blocks looked too busy and overwhelmed the design. So, I just made fewer blocks in the original size, which is frankly small enough.
It's being panto quilted with snowflakes, and will be called "Christmas in America". (I'm really getting into this quilt naming thing!)

What else is going on? Well, I made a small mystery quilt (59" x 59") from Quiltbug's site for Superbowl Sunday and I won a $25 gift certificate for being one of the first to finish. The generous site owner gave directions for a 42" square and a 59" square design, and awarded a gift certificate to two people, the first ones who sent her a photo of a finished quilt for each size. Yay me!

I probably should have used a more interesting background than the Moda Marbles ivory, but that's part of the danger of mystery quilts - by the time you realize you should have made other fabric choices, it's usually too late. But it will make a great larger quilt for Project Linus.

ADDENDUM: In case you are wondering why the quilt is hanging so funny in the picture, I thumbtacked it to the tops of the closet door facings to take a picture at midnight on Sunday. I had just finished it and was trying to get the photo quickly, and no way was I going to get out the tension rods I put on the closet jambs to hang up this quilt! And it's wider than the one closet door so it extends across the wall onto the other closet's door frame. That's what the weird wrinkle on the bottom right is; I can confirm the quilt is square. And I don't know if it's visible in the picture, but I put a "peeper" in the borders between the green and rust, and I swear to you I'm never doing one of those again! All that trouble and you can't even see it!

Well, back to the triangles. . .