You know that quilt that goes awry?

I hope I'm not the only one that sometimes starts a quilt and somehow it morphs into a completely different quilt in the process. Yep, that is exactly what happened on a recent quilt project. At Thanksgiving I planned to do the Bonnie Hunter mystery quilt in order to "up" my piecing skills. If you aren't familiar with Bonnie Hunter she's an accomplished designer/quilter that focuses on precise piecing and use of scraps. She hosts an on-line mystery quilt starting the Friday after Thanksgiving. BH does an awesome job of tutoring (via video) quilters through a complex quilt design step-by-step.

Clues are released weekly on Friday for several weeks, usually ending in late January with the design likely to show up later in one of her many books.

Despite my good intentions of getting this quilt, On Ringo Lake is the name, started and pieced regularly, I ended up with many customer quilts after Thanksgiving and that trend lasted through late January--just in time for quilt guild beginner classes to start. Being one of the teachers, I figured I best be ready for that class!. So my fabrics for the 2017 BH Mystery sat stacked on the extra bed.

When I started my mystery quilt in March, my intent was also to use my Accuquilt die cutter to cut the pieces--accuracy depends on accurate cuts! But BH did not release them and once I figured it out, I would have had to purchase many new dies--not in the budget. Plus by then I was also not loving the colors or the finished quilt I was seeing on-line. So....I did some cutting on my Accuquilt and ended up with some traditional looking blocks--boring! Instead I threw them on the design wall, decided to add a whole bunch of 4" string blocks and had the whole thing exploding from the traditional blocks on the bottom. Quilting it was done to reflect that too. So here it is--not everyone's taste in quilts, but certainly an experience! I call it "It's a Mystery--BH2017 or BUQ??"