Good Fortune {Finished Quilt}

I am so happy that my version of Bonnie Hunter's Good Fortune mystery quilt is now finished!

I made a scaled down version of last year's mystery quilt -- I made half as many blocks for the center of the quilt -- and then adjusted my borders slightly to fit the size of my quilt.

My mom quilted this for me on her mid-arm. She used a chrysanthemum motif for the quilting.

The backing is a red extra wide backing, I also used this fabric for the binding. I decided to hand stitch the binding on this quilt; I typically prefer to hand finish the binding on pieced borders.

My quilt is a small throw, and will likely spend most of its life in our guest room. 

Quilt stats:
Name: Good Fortune
Pattern: Good Fortune by Bonnie Hunter, modified to a throw size
Fabrics: Scraps
Quilting: Chrysanthemums, quilted by my mom
Techniques used: string piecing, stitch and flip corners, pieced borders
Size: approximately 54" square
Started: November 2018
Finished: July 2019
Future: Guest room throw

Sharing at Let's Bee Social and Needle and Thread Thursday!

Too Hot To Trot {Literally}

Depending on where in the world you live, you might have spent your weekend similar to me: being outside as little as possible and avoiding the awful, oppressive heat and counting down the hours until the cool front moved in.

Saturday I had to make a quick trip down to the quilt shop to drop off quilts for their gallery! We are just so excited that Capital Quilts is carrying some of our favorite HBD patterns and that I am teaching a class there in just two weeks! If you are semi-local, consider coming out for a class on our Ready, Set, Soar Pattern!

While I was there, I picked up a couple cuts of fabric. The top fabric, from Vintage Picnic, will be the binding for my April Showers bee quilt. The other two fabrics were picked from clearance for general stash additions.

I spent the rest of the day working on the bindings of the three quilts that my mom brought back to me from the quilter -- two went to the long armer and one quilt she quilted. One by one, I trimmed each quilt and added the bindings to my Double Delight. Good Fortune, and April Showers quilts.

This was the pile of aftermath on my kitchen table from trimming three quilts. While I bought the navy pear fabric for the April Showers quilts, I used the backing for the binding for both Double Delight (the navy fabric peaking out) and Good Fortune (the red fabric). I hand bound Good Fortune, but the other two quilts were bound completely by machine.

(A quick aside: would you find it helpful for me to write a tutorial about using the backing for binding? Talking about trimming your quilt after quilting to maximize usable fabric? Tell me in the comments!)

So spoiler alert: I have three (t-h-r-e-e!) finished quilts that I will be showing off over the next two weeks! But none today, because the heat was just too much to try to take pictures of them outside.

I had also not yet put away my Jingle Bell Square fabrics, so I decided that I would make whatever units I could make -- not necessarily worrying about making full blocks -- and set them aside for the next time I pull out this project. In sorting my scraps, I found some larger pieces that allowed me to squeeze out *five* more blocks for this project!

Now I have 14 red blocks and 12 green blocks -- a total of 26 out of the 49 that I need to make -- now I have officially crossed the 50% mark!

I have also been keeping up with making my border QSTs and did end up with a few extra block parts:

But, ideally, the rest of this week's blog posts will be dedicated to finishes! It will be so nice to have fewer WIPs on my list -- and we'll see how long I can resist starting a new project!

Sharing at What I Made Monday and Wednesday Wait Loss!

Good Fortune {Finished Quilt Top}

After having to make a bunch more units for my borders (which was a long detour!) I have finished my Good Fortune quilt top!

The first task was finishing up the extra green HSTs for my green HST border. I also cut the necessary extra units for my QST units at the same time.

It was nice to already be mostly done with this border and only have to worry about adding on the last side!

I decided to skip the neutral border from the original quilt and just add the QST border directly to the HST border as it was *exactly* the right size for an even number of units. I also probably don't have enough background fabric to add a spacer border of any size anyways -- I only started with 2 yards of the dot print as my background, didn't feel like ordering more, and I like the look of the two different pieced borders next to one another.

Now this top is finished! My changes from Bonnie's original are as follows:
--substitute aqua instead of orange
--half as many total blocks in the center
--spacer border before HST border
--skipped neutral pieced border between HST border and QST border

I'm not sure how and when this one will be quilted -- having On Ringo Lake pantograph quilted was definitely the right decision for that quilt, but I am going back and forth about what to do with this one. It's certainly a manageable size for me to quilt since it's a small throw, but since it isn't a project with a deadline, it will likely be shelved for a while.

But I do know one thing -- this quilt needs a red binding once it is quilted!

Have a Happy Wednesday and Happy Valentine's Day!

Sharing at Needle and Thread Thursday!

Good Fortune {75%}

A little progress is better than no progress, right? I had big plans to start quilting a quilt on Saturday, but that got kicked to the wayside. I hemmed some curtains on Saturday (go me!) but that was the extent of my sewing.

Sunday afternoon I went back to work on Good Fortune. My first task was to get the spacer border added. I double checked my math and cut my background strips. These zipped on extremely quickly, other than the fact that one WOF was *just barely* too short for the sides, so all four border strips had to be pieced.

Next came the arduous task of making the chains of HSTs for the green sawtooth border. I realized that I didn't have quite enough HSTs for all four sides, but figured that I would rather get as far as I could get and then figure out exactly how many more green HSTs I would need.

First border added:

(I also realized how badly my ironing board needs recovered -- not the usual reason of the fabric being ripped to shreds, but because there's this rather large divot in the one end that made pressing the borders somewhat difficult.)

With the HSTs that I already had made, I was able to complete three of the four sides, and start the piecing of the fourth and final side. Much of the border wobbly-ness that I was slightly worried about after adding my spacer border as been evened out after adding the HST border.

So now I'm back to making HSTs. All are sewn and ready to be trimmed and pressed.

Bonnie's directions have a neutral border between the green HSTs and the blue QSTs, however my quilt top is currently the perfect size for adding the blue QST border with an even number of units. That would mean skipping the neutral border between the pieced border -or- adding a much wider pieced border to get the quilt width to the right size. 

I will need to make about a dozen more QST units, so I am leaning towards skipping this spacer border because I am almost out of background fabric. My quilt will then end up around 54", which is right about the same size as my finished ORL quilt. I've seen some other creative solutions on the Quiltville Facebook group that I might also consider.

What do you think? Check out Bonnie's finished version of the quilt here and give me all of your creative solutions.

Sharing at Oh Scrap, Linky Tuesday, and Needle and Thread Thursday!

Update 2/11/19:
Also sharing at Bonnie's final Good Fortune link up! I have made some progress on the quilt since I wrote this blog post, so hopefully I will be able to share my finished top by the end of this week!

-- A@LBQ

Good Fortune {Spinning Stars and Border Beginnings}

My Good Fortune quilt is no longer units and blocks -- it's the beginning of a quilt top and units waiting to be turned into borders, hooray!

Pairing up my HST sets and half-chevrons to make the block quarters for my Spinning Star units was a quick and easy process. Getting the quarters into blocks was also quick and easy -- the seams nested perfectly and within a short while, all of my blocks were complete!

There's definitely a lot of the lighter blue lattice print (in the block corners) in these units, but ending up with a lot of blue lattice HSTs was much better than buying extra fabric for this project! I'm also SO happy with my decision to be fussy about the stripe in my green print -- I think the stripes add to the swirling effect of the block.

Following Bonnie's pressing directions meant that all of my seams nested like a dream while putting together my Spinning Stars and String Chain blocks into the center of the top.

Seeing the quilt center complete reaffirms that I made the right decision for my color scheme. I love how the green pinwheels pop and the red four patches remind me of little red berries.

I'm skipping the string border sections, so I used background rectangles combined with the remaining HSTs for the first border. I made all of my border HST units the same and then pulled four more HSTs of the same fabric for the four corners.

Now I come to a bit of a pickle. Because of sizing my quilt down, the next pieced border won't fit correctly with an even number of units, so I will need to add a spacer border. I originally thought about doing a green border, cut that green border, and then realized that I had done my math wrong. Whoops.

I think ultimately this is a blessing in disguise because I think a background spacer border will be a better choice and I can probably use the green strips that I already cut as the next spacer border. A quilt with three pieced borders is definitely easier if you are making the prescribed size of quilt! 

This weekend, my plan is to actually put this away for a few days so that I can do some quilting (!!!) for the first time since the move. I still need to find a border fabric for my January UFO project too, as the end of the month is quickly approaching. 

What are your weekend sewing plans? Do you find yourself at a project impasse?

Happy Friday!

Good Fortune {Clue #7 and Making Blocks}

Moving has (understandably) put me slightly behind schedule for my Good Fortune quilt. However, I now have a mostly operable sewing space (hooray) and managed to squeak in Clue #7 and some block construction.

For Clue #7, we made some of the units we needed for block construction. I made the 16 patch units first.

Next up were the four-HST chains. These will be used in the border and I made each of these units the same.

At this point, I realized that I needed to make a few more HSTs for my spinning star blocks. I picked a fabric that I hadn't used yet for HSTs and made about a dozen more HSTs.

These were added in with the rest of my HSTs to make the HST pairs for the spinning star units.

I also sewed up the chain blocks that use the 16 patch units, more four patches, and the scrappy string rectangles. These were quick and easy with minimal matching. I'm very happy with my choice to substitute aqua for orange in my quilt!

My plan for this week is to get my spinning star blocks put together and then put the center of the quilt together. After that, I will have to measure, count, and perhaps make additional border units, depending on how many I actually need. Making half of what Bonnie directs has put me pretty close for what I need but hopefully I won't have to make too many more of those tiny green triangles!

Tomorrow is my day for the Getaway Blog hop! I am so excited to show you my new version of our Dashing to the Chapel pattern!

Good Fortune {Clues #5 and #6}

Despite the fact that I was out of state away from my sewing machine for nearly 5 days, I did manage to complete Clue #5 before Clue #6 came out last week.

On the Friday Clue #5 was released, I got home from work early and managed to get the clue nearly completed in fits and bursts throughout the evening that day. By the time we left for Ohio for Christmas, I had all of the units sewn and ready for their final pressing and trimming.

The day we got back, after unpacking and a quick trip to the grocery store, the units were pressed and trimmed. This was another quick and easy clue, and especially so making only half of the prescribed number of units. These units are mirror image sets -- left and right facing, or clockwise and counterclockwise, whichever naming convention you prefer.

On a side note -- what do you  call these units? I usually call them ribbon units since it reminds me of folded ribbon.

I used three different aquas in this step and seven different dark blues. The three different patriotic prints were not ones that I had originally pulled for this quilt and they originally were featured in my Uncle Sam wall hanging. A couple dark blue prints were charm squares given to me by a friend. The aqua paisley print was also used long ago for a baby quilt, the dot is leftover backing fabric (featured in quite a few of my recent quilts!), and geometric lace print is from my Meadow Dance pocket hanger.

For Clue #6, we've been instructed to make neutral string pieced strips, similar to Clue #4. Bonnie's caveat for those who might not want to strip piece these units and use a single fabric for the rectangles is to skip this clue and come back to it once the reveal happens.

For now, I am not planning to strip piece those units and will cut the necessary parts from my background fabric when I need them. Measuring my remaining background fabric, I am more than likely going to need to order more of this dot print to finish the quilt so it's probably better to wait to see how those units will be used.

I also am totally fine with "skipping" a clue for now, as the progress of packing and moving has begun! We closed on our house on Friday and have big plans for painting before we move next weekend.

I still have one finish for 2018 to photograph and post -- hopefully that will happen on Sunday! Yesterday it rained the entire day so hopefully I can at least get a few pictures today.

Sharing at Bonnie's Mystery Monday Link up!

Good Fortune {Clue #4}

After finishing Clue #3 of Good Fortune the night before Clue #4 came out, I was so excited to see that this clue was so quick and easy! Click here for all of the Good Fortune mystery information!

For Clue #4, we were instructed to make scrappy strip pieced rectangles. I was so thrilled with this because I was able to use up a ton of small scraps and I was able to finish the entire clue before I went out and did my grocery shopping on Saturday morning!

To start, I separated my aqua (instead of orange!) scraps into three piles -- bits, strips, and chunks. I also sorted out anything that was too small for this section of units.
-- "Bits" were anything at least 1.5" wide and up to about 6" square
-- "Strips" were strips at least 1" wide and up to 20" long
-- "Chunks" were anything WOF long or wider than 6"

I sorted my scraps this way so that I could focus on using the smallest pieces first. Some of these pieces have been in my stash a very long time -- and some fabrics were used in my On Ringo Lake too!

I did not use paper foundations for my units -- I also used a lot smaller scraps than Bonnie instructs -- so my units are actually all different, rather than having sets of matching strippy rectangles. Most of my units have 4 different fabrics, but a few have 5 or 6.

There are a lot of scraps in these pieces that came from my Wallflowers row quilt but a lot of it ended up being random things that have been hanging around my stash for a long time. I really like how many of the units ended up with red accents!

These also made a very nice dent in my scrap piles! The majority of my bits and strips piles were obliterated (literally!) to make these units and I only had to dip into my chunks pile a little bit for fabric variety at the end. Depending on the rest of the units for this quilt, I might not have enough aqua, or rather, enough variety of aqua, so another dig through my stash to pull some additional fabrics might be in order.

Here's a few units from Clue #3 and Clue #4 hanging out together:

I will admit that I'm a little confuzzled by our two different sizes of HSTs (for now) so I'm not going to strain my brain in trying to solve the mystery just yet.

Here's a collage of my four finished clues:

This is likely the point where I will fall utterly and completely behind! Between leaving for the holidays and closing on our house (!!!) the next few weeks are going to be very busy!

Sharing at Bonnie's Mystery Monday Link-up and Linky Tuesday!

Good Fortune {Clue #3}

It's time for another Good Fortune update! For clue #3, we are making two units from our green fabric -- units that Bonnie calls "half chevrons" and half square triangles that can be made as bonus triangles!

For my green fabric, instead of pulling from my green scrap pile, I pulled a single green fabric. This fabric was used in the piecing of and as the backing of my "Green in Bloom" quilt last year. I have large chunks of this fabric left over -- I'm guessing I have a little under a yard in scraps which should be more than enough for a half-sized version of Good Fortune. (This is the best picture I can grab of the green fabric!)

Bonnie lists multiple ways to make both of the units -- I decided to test out the method to make the chevron units and then use the "bonus triangles" for the smaller HSTs. I am not usually a fan of the stitch and flip method because it can waste a lot of fabric but this method puts the scraps to work!

I found I didn't need to mark two lines for the seams -- if I marked the diagonal for the first, and used my foot as a guide, my HSTs came out just about perfect, with the exception of just a few! 

By Monday, I was about two-thirds of the way complete with my units. Sewing progress in the evenings is rare and slow for me this time of year so I was worried that I wouldn't get finished before the Clue #4 came out today. However, I did finish Clue #3 last night -- just under the wire!

Even with making half as many units as Bonnie's directions, this clue took a long time for me! However, once I figured out my correct seam allowances, I only ended up with four HSTs that were slightly too small. If I need more in the final layout of my quilt, I will make more units then, but for now, I will continue to shoot for half-ish of Bonnie's directions.

Happy Friday! I'm hoping that Clue #4 (which just came out!) is just as quick and easy as I imagine it to be! I have a pile of secret sewing to sew (and HSTs to trim!) this weekend, so hopefully both will go quickly and without incident.

Good Fortune {Clue #2}

Much like last week, I was able to get my entire clue done over the weekend -- hooray!

This week for the Good Fortune mystery quilt, we are making small HSTs. Even though I am shooting for a half sized version, I still had to make a LOT of HSTs!

On Friday night, I did all of the cutting. About half were made from the two-at-a-time HST method (which I prefer) and about half were made with the "Bonnie" method to better utilize some of my scraps.

Saturday morning I did the sewing, and between Saturday evening and Sunday evening I did all of the trimming.

I ended up using nine different blues -- some more popular than others! A few fabrics were only used to make two HSTs in this step -- others were used to make dozens!

(And yes, I realize that the third row has some of the HSTs twisted about -- I didn't realize it until I had already stacked and counted and bagged all of my HST piles and wasn't about to try to redo this picture!

I pulled out a few of my Clue #1 four patches to look at the units together. The quilt could really become anything at this point -- with only four patches and HSTs, the possibilities are endless!

And of course -- a rundown of some of the fabric origins! A few fabrics are actually from long-ago swaps, from my Frame of Mind MBS quilt, my Favorite Frames MBS quilt, the border of my Drift Away quilt, and the backing of my Starburst quilt!

Linking up with the Monday Mystery link-up on Bonnie's Blog! Also sharing at Linky Tuesday and Let's Bee Social!

Good Fortune {Clue #1} + Double Delight {Finished Top}

Despite the fact that I had to work on Black Friday (boo!) I was able to take a half day, complete a bunch of errands, and get all of the sewing done on Clue #1 for the Good Fortune Mystery Quilt!

For this clue we eased ourselves in a little bit with simple four patches made with our background fabric and our red fabric -- since the only color I changed was replacing orange with aqua, nearly all of my units will be the same as Bonnie's examples.

I used approximately 16 different red fabrics for these four patches, some of them are technically Christmas fabrics but for the most part they are small enough that it won't be entirely obvious. I also used two red patriotic fabrics that were left over from my Uncle Sam wall hanging all the way back in 2013! There are also fabrics from my Christmas Twirls MBS quilt, my Blitzen Basketcase quilt, the tree skirt that I made for my mother-in-law, my Jingle Bell Rock MBS quilt, and a few projects that I've done with Benartex for their Sew in Love with Fabric blog!

For now, I am still planning to use just one background fabric. If there comes a clue where I find that it would be helpful to have multiple background fabrics, I might add in one or two for just those clues but keep my ditsy dot as my main background.

Since I was able to get Clue #1 finished before I even went out for groceries on Saturday, I decided that it was high time to finally put the borders on my Double Delight quilt! I had finished the rest of the top all the way back in June and picked out the border fabric in October and even cut the borders for this quilt when I cut the borders for my Drift Away quilt! Double Delight is an older mystery quilt pattern on Bonnie's site.

As you might be able to tell in the photos, my side borders are skinnier than my top and bottom borders. This way the quilt had a little more length since I tend to make mostly twin-sized and queen-sized quilts when I go big, rather than full-sized quilts. My quilt is now a lovely twin sized at 70" x 88".

The border fabric came from the clearance at my LQS -- it's a Downton Abbey print from 2014, but it has the perfect shades of red, pink, and a tiny bit of chartreuse!

This quilt is now ready for quilting. This might be one that I send out to have a lovely large pantograph done on it to keep the tiny piecing front and center!

Sharing at Bonnie's Monday Mystery Link-up and Linky Tuesday!

Good Fortune {My Fabric Choices}

For many, Black Friday means shopping, stampedes, and sales. For many quilters, it is the kick off of Bonnie Hunter's annual mystery quilt! This year the quilt is called "Good Fortune" and the colors are inspired by Bonnie's recent trip to China.

Bonnie's color palette has orange as the main color, with red, blue, and green as the accent colors. All of her colors are rich and saturated. If you remember back to my version of On Ringo Lake from last year, I actually used orange (and a lot of it!) in that quilt.

I definitely didn't have enough orange in my scraps to use as my main color in my version of Good Fortune. What to do? I considered trying to find a totally different color scheme to use like I did last year but there wasn't anything that really jumped out at me. Instead, I decided to find a color I could just simply swap out for the orange and this is where I landed:

Despite the fact that I used aqua in ORL last year, Drift Away, Donuts, AND my Magnolia mystery quilt, I still have scads and scads of aqua scraps! My goal is to keep my blues dark and my aquas light so that if the two colors end up next to one another that there will still be a lot of contrast between the two.

My fabrics will be very scrappy for the red, blue, and aqua, but I only have one background fabric (the creamy white dot) and one green fabric. I have a lot of this particular green left -- it was used in the piecing and backing of my Green in Blue quilt. I originally had 5 yards of the fabric and what I have left should be plenty for my planned half-size version of Good Fortune. I might need to get a little bit more of the white dot print for the background, but since it's a current fabric, I should have no issues getting more of it.

There have been some hints that it will be better for the background fabric to be scrappy -- or at the very least, use multiple fabrics. I am on the fence about this and will see what the clues have us do. I am wondering if there will be something like the neutral border on En Provence in this quilt. (Not an affiliate link!)

I am still planning to be at work all or most of the day Friday, but one of our LQS will have open sewing on Friday, so I am considering working a half day and heading over to the LQS in the afternoon.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!