Making Time for My Daughter

Bonnie Hunter of quiltville fame runs a mystery quilt every winter. This year I wasn't going to do it, because I have a bunch of Christmas presents to make, and I've just been crazy busy. Here's the thing, last year my daughter in South Africa chose the colors, and the quilt went to her when it was done. She loved choosing the colors, following along with the clues, and seeing how her color choices came together. This year she asked if she could choose the colors again, but she's OK with not receiving the quilt.

What to do? I am legitimately busy, but there are so few things I can participate in with my daughter overseas. I'd be fine missing this year's mystery quilt, but I'm not OK with not doing something with my oldest daughter. So, she chose colors with a couple conditions on my end.

1) I am not planning on keeping up with the clues, but I can and will make a few of each unit as I go along. I will make enough to be able to make some blocks when that time comes.

2) I will let her choose 2 colorways, with the condition that one uses the men's shirts I have, and the other uses a purple background.

3) I don't have to make these into full sized quilts, if they end up being baby quilts because that's all I have time for, that's what they'll be. That said, I'm not ruling out full-sized quilts, if I really like how they are coming out, one of both may just become leader/ender projects for next year.

For the men's shirts, she was thinking of a red and white lighthouse on the beach. She chose red, white, blue, green, and tan. This was what I pulled from my shirt stash.

The more I looked at it, the more I was unhappy with the tans, and her second choice was yellow, but I simply didn't have enough yellow shirts. She hasn't seen my change yet, but I swapped out the tans for a constant gold.

That's MUCH better! More contrast with the whites, and no matter what units it ends up being in, it will stand on it's own.

So the men's shirt colorway is pulled. For the other colorway, I wanted a purple background, because I found a purple duvet cover that was large enough to be the background, and I love using odd colored backgrounds.

I think we are going with purple and brights. She was debating another colorway, which I really liked, but couldn't have gone very scrappy on. I'm trying not to buy fabric for these. I have more of these colors, but I know I'll hit my strips drawers first, so I'm not going to bother pulling any more fabrics unless I need them.

The drastically different palettes will keep me entertained, and I can make some progress on some other projects as leaders/enders while I'm working on the mystery quilt. I think I will still have enough time to get the Christmas presents done, since I'm not trying to make all the units for both quilts. If I spend one day per week on the mystery, and just make what I can in that time frame, I will have plenty of Christmas sewing time.

I actually really like Bonnie's color choices this year, and so does my daughter. My thing is, I don't want a quilt that looks like hundreds of other quilts, thus, I switch my colors. Now my daughter has to decide which color substitutes for which color, so I can make my substitution cards to keep me straight when following the clues. If you want to see Bonnie's colors, check out her post here.

By the way, I've finished "de-boning" the shirts I bought in Flagstaff, and several of them will be used for the mystery quilt.

Another thing I did this week was make a capes for the twins to wear to Comicon.  I only had a day, so I used fleece, and faked a pattern.

Miss S is wearing her blue cape, but Mr L didn't end up wearing his purple one. Not too bad for a quickie job, and they'll be great for playing dress-up.