Magnolia Mystery Quilt {Finished Quilt}

I set a hard-stop limit on myself that I wasn't going to allow myself to start the new mystery quilt (Mosaic Mystery Quilt) until I finished my Magnolia quilt and now I have one fewer WIP on my list!

Here's the quilt post-trimming, pre-binding:

For the binding, I used a red cable print and cut it to create the stripey binding.

The grey thread was the exact right shade for the background fabric (Kona Coal) but isn't too obtrusive on the print fabrics. I bound this quilt entirely by machine and used white thread to do the final top stitching but had grey in the bobbin since it blended well on the backing fabric as well.

My quilt is slightly modified from the original pattern -- I added the sashings and cornerstones between the blocks and my quilt has the blocks running vertically rather than horizontally (however the picture above is hung the other way just because it shows the blocks better). I think the final size is similar to the original pattern.

I have made quite a few red, blue, teal, and green quilts lately!
April Showers
Good Fortune

Quilt stats:
Name: Magnolia mystery quilt
Pattern: Magnolia Mystery Quilt by Cheryl Brickey of Meadow Mist Designs, modified
Fabrics: Kona Coal and scraps for piecing
Quilting: free motion quilted meanders and semi-custom quilted blocks
Size: 70" x 60"
Started: August 2017
Finished: August 2019
Future: TBD

Sharing at Brag About Your Beauties and Oh Scrap!

Also sharing at Favorite Finishes for August!

Magnolia Mystery Quilt {Quilting in Progress}

It's been over 18 months since I finished this quilt top and almost a year since I bought the backing and the binding for this quilt. It was finally time this weekend to pull this quilt out and make progress on finishing it.

One of the things I continually waffled on -- and was the main impediment to starting this quilt -- was deciding how to quilt it. I always planned on quilting it with light/medium grey thread but struggled with what motif(s) to use and if I should use an all over design or if I should do some sort of custom quilting. 

So I decided to do both.

I have quilting inside of the non-background fabric of a more custom variety and meandering throughout the grey background.

In the bearpaw/flower (whichever you see) I have a swirl with loops in the points. In the red squares, I have curved side echoes. I figured out a way to continuously quilt an individual block without thread breaks and then once I was done with a block, I would meander in the space around it until I got to the next block.

Right now, I am mostly done with the blocks and about 50% done with the quilting.

Here's a sort of askew photo of more of the quilt.

I have one full block left to quilt and all four half blocks. I have a lot of background left to quilt as well.

Sharing at Needle and Thread Thursday!

Magnolia Mystery Quilt {Finished Top}

After thinking about the quilt some more and listening to your feedback on my post last week, I decided to go ahead and add sashing to my Magnolia mystery quilt.

Since all of the piecing within the quilt is done with 2.5" strips and squares, I thought it would be most cohesive to have 2.5" sashings. Putting together the top with sashings, cornerstones, and setting triangles was actually a quick process!

With these modifications, my quilt measured 45 inches across and 70 inches long. I cut 7.5 inch strips for the sides of the quilt and don't plan to add anything else to the top or bottom.

Now my quilt is finished and I need to start plotting what to use for backing! I already know that I want to bind this in aqua.

I don't think I'll be quilting this before the deadline to submit quilts and tops for the final quilt parade, but I'm glad to shift this into the "finished top" category!

Ps. We now have a Honey, Bunny, and Doll FACEBOOK GROUP! Join in to see an early preview of our upcoming quilt along!

Sharing at Let's Bee Social!

Magnolia Mystery Quilt {Blocks and Layout}

While the final directions for the Magnolia mystery quilt came out in early December, deadlines and On Ringo Lake have delayed me from getting these blocks put together!

My blocks for my throw sized quilt came together very quickly and easily.

We also had to make four half blocks. These will need to be trimmed but I'm not planning to do that until final assembly.

Here are all of my blocks laid out together in Cheryl's design.

I'm very happy with the block layout and orientation of the original design, but I'm considering adding a skinny sashing between my rows so that the individual blocks stand out. That disrupts the secondary pattern of the stars created where the "leaves" come together, so I'm not sure what to do. What do you think?

Sharing at Let's Bee Social and NTT!

Ps. We now have a Honey, Bunny, and Doll FACEBOOK GROUP! Join in to see an early preview of our upcoming quilt along!

Magnolia Mystery QAL {Flower Blocks}

A new month means that there are new directions for the Magnolia Mystery Quilt! This month, we are making blocks out of the units we had made in September and October!

This month we made 32 full flower blocks and 8 half flower blocks. Cheryl gave some helpful tips for those of us who are making scrappy versions of the quilt which were great! 

First, I made the sets including half blocks. Each set has one right-facing half block, one left-facing half block, and one full block all with the same blue fabric. 

For the remainder of the full flower blocks, I made them in sets of four. In total, I used seven different blue fabrics and five different red fabrics in my blocks. The green fabric is the same throughout.

Given that we've made half blocks, I think that our quilt will end up on point, but I'm still unsure how everything will come together! We'll also be doing more cutting in a later month, so we'll see where that takes us!

Sharing at Oh Scrap, Main Crush Monday, Let's Bee Social and Needle and Thread Thursday!

Magnolia Mystery QAL {Half Geese Units}

After seeing lots of people post their finished units for this month as part of the Magnolia Mystery QAL, I wanted to get mine done as well!

This month's direction uses the 4.5 x 2.5 inch Fabric B rectangles combined with background squares to make "half geese". I am using scrappy aqua prints for my Fabric B and I followed Cheryl's suggestion to cut these rectangles in sets of four. When making my half geese units, I made sure that each set of four ended up with two right facing and two left facing geese.

I have seven different fabrics -- I think it's a good variety of fabrics that will work well together in a quilt. For now they wait until next month's directions come out!

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

Magnolia Mystery QAL {Half Square Triangles}

Our September assignment for the Magnolia Mystery QAL hosted by Cheryl at Meadow Mist Designs was to take all of our Fabric A squares and pair them with background squares to make half square triangles.

Since I still hadn't cut my background fabric (whoops!) I did that before starting on my HSTs. My background is Kona Coal and my fabric A is not scrappy. This is the print from Folk Art Fantasy by Amanda Murphy I am using for fabric A:

I must have cut extra fabric A squares because I ended up with quite a few extra HSTs! I did have a couple that were a touch on the small size, so it was nice to have the option to set those aside.

Here are all 72 trimmed to 2.5 inches! It took a good chunk of a baseball game to get this done!

Now to patiently wait for the October directions! It's not even halfway through September and I've already finished my September Island Batik project, the September directions for this quilt along, my September Stash Bee blocks, and finished with one project for an upcoming blog hop! Hopefully this means that I'll be able to dig into some projects and maybe even finish them!

Sharing at Linky Tuesday, Let's Bee Social, and NTT!

Magnolia Mystery QAL {Fabric Pull & Cutting}

Since finishing the top of my Meadow Mystery Quilt, I have been looking forward to the newest edition of Cheryl's mystery QAL series -- the Magnolia mystery quilt!

For this quilt along, I decided to go with a controlled scrappy fabric pull rather than pulling from my stash, as I have done for both the Meadow and Midnight mystery quilts. Having leftovers from a few of the blog hop projects I have done recently as well as leftovers from old bundles, I pooled fabrics from Folk Art Fantasy, Sparkle, and Wallflowers, and added in a few fabrics from my scrap boxes.

For Fabric A, I had enough of the mint green floral Folk Art Fantasy print for the 3/8 yard required for the quilt. Cheryl actually suggests using layer cake squares or jelly roll strips for Fabric B - I settled on using the aqua prints since I had the most variety of blues. Red was the obvious choice for Fabric C given what I had on hand.

For background, I believe that I've settled on Kona Coal. White seems like it is a little humdrum, but black might be too stark. I think using Coal will provide nice contrast from the mint green and aqua, but will be a little bit softer than straight up black.

I did all of the cutting for Fabrics A, B, and C -- and here they all are arranged in a beautiful fashion on my good cutting board. For both the aqua and the red, there were colors I didn't end up using at all! Some because the prints were too large (the aqua floral in the picture above) and some because I had more fabric than I needed and cut from the smallest scraps first.

Fabric A was obviously much simpler to cut since it was just one piece!

And here's a picture of all of them as they exist in real life -- in plastic bags in a bin waiting for next month's sewing directions.

Are you participating? Did you take advantage of the HBD Kona Special yet?

Sharing at Oh Scrap and Needle and Thread Thursday!