Part 2 of Bonnie Hunter Mystery Chilhowie

 Here are a few of the units from Part 2 of Bonnie Hunter's new mystery challenge Chilhowie. This quilt has a white for the neutral background, a persimmon-type orange as a medium, teal for the dark and coral for the light. And if you are keeping score, so far we have only used up about 20 percent of the neutral/white fabric but have used about 50 percent of the dark. Fascinating!

Today was a bit traumatic for Buddy. A comment on the last post suggested that he might have been responsible for scrabbling the strips and causing numerous errant strip sets. He could barely take a serious beauty nap because of all the laughter from Molly.

She was laughing at me, not Buddy. Molly insisted that I show the mess next to the sewing machine. She suspects that if Buddy did start moving strips around, the pile could only get neater given my strips are as close to absolute chaos as possible. But I do appreciate the assumption that I work in an orderly way and that only a cat could cause human error.

Bonnie Hunter Mystery 2022

 Bonnie Hunter started her mystery challenge Chilhowie last week and I was so pleased that she eased us into the challenge with some simple four-patches and nine patches. [Insert sound of loud record scratch].

It turns out what is easy in my theoretical brain turned into long sessions with my seam ripper. And maybe some cussing. But let's go back a step to color choices...I like teal/aqua and orange, but didn't want to revisit a purple and orange quilt. So instead of having the orange as a medium bright, I moved aqua/teal to the dark, and orange (that is, coral) to the light. The background is still white. For medium bright, I am planning on a multicolor (or a few friendly multicolors) fabric that I expect to jump out of my stash sometime along the way.

Meanwhile, let's discuss where theory and reality don't match. Essentially all I had to do for the strip sets were dark teal strips with coral on either side and coral with white on either side. When I took my strip sets to the ironing board I found all sorts of combinations...teal surrounded by white and orange surrounded by teal. And yes, one strip set was orange with a white strip sewn to a white strip. !!!

This was not one night of bad sewing...but repeated throughout the week.

And maybe my language behavior may have required a teacher-parent conference.