Easy Street Part 1

The last thing I should be doing right now is starting another quilt, but when I saw the colors Bonnie Hunter was using in her mystery quilt this year, I said to heck with it and jumped right in. I rarely use lime greens, cool aquas, and purples in my quilts, but I have plenty of them. Don't ask me why--I don't know--but this is a fine time to use them. I think this combination of colors, plus the gray and the black and whites, is spectacular.

I've wanted to make a black and white quilt for years, and I recently acquired a couple of large scrap bags from an auction that contained a lovely collection of black and white scraps, so I only had to buy a couple yards of gray, and that's it. All the rest came from the stash.
 

192 four-patch units are required to complete Part 1 of the Easy Street mystery, and so far I've made 100. I didn't decide immediately that I was going to start the mystery, so I lost a couple of days. Part 2 will be released tomorrow, so I'll try to get all caught up by the time Part 3 is released.

The weather has turned much colder in Maine. The low tonight is supposed to be 14 degrees, 12 degrees tomorrow night. Wonder when we're going to get some snow.

November Finish

Ten years ago I took a class at quiltuniversity.com called Fingers of Fire Tree Skirt, taught by Nyla Morrison. The tree skirt on the right, which is folded in half, was the result from that class. I sewed and cut wedges for a second tree skirt at the same time, but I never put them together. A month or so ago, I hauled them out and finished the second skirt for one of my sons. I finished sewing the binding on yesterday about three hours before my husband left with it for New York where my son is living, so I didn't get a photo of the skirt quilted and bound.

These tree skirts are so easy to make. I made 10 strip sets of 9 fabrics, then used a 9 degree ruler to cut out the wedges. The wedges are then sewn edge to edge--nothing to match. 40 wedges make a circle.

To make the best use of the fabric, the ruler is flip flopped down the length of the strip set as the wedges are cut, so you get enough wedges for two tree skirts, only the sequence of colors is reversed on the two skirts.

One of the two skirts from this new set of wedges will be for my other son.

These are the selvages from a couple of the Christmas fabrics I bought. So many quilters are saving their selvages now, and I had heard that at least one fabric manufacturer started to use some different designs on the edges instead of the usual color dots, but I hadn't seen any until I found these two fabrics. Love the selvage on the "Winter Elegance" fabric. A selvage quilt is on my list for next year.

More Hexies

I finished five more hexies in the last several weeks, hexies #49, 50, 51, 52, and 53. Less than 30 full-sized blocks left to go to reach my goal. Never imagined I'd get this far. The two on the left are my favorites this month. I fussy cut the outer ring of the one on the lower left and liked it well enough to fussy cut another one this week.

When I finished the last of these five, I was all caught up. But I didn't finish the one from last week yet, and I'm not on target to finish the one for this week either. Just too many other things to do to finish getting ready for Christmas. The hours I've been keeping are awful, and I'll be glad when this year is over.