Carolina Christmas Quilt

Over the last two weeks I have been trying to solve a mystery…..a mystery quilt.  Bonnie over at Quiltville has been entertaining me with her free online mystery quilt, Carolina Christmas.  It was designed to be a Christmas quilt but I opted out of the Christmas version as I am not a fan of the color green so I don’t have many green scraps.

The photo shows some of the blocks lying out on my design wall  floor which has shrunk considerable since we put up the Christmas tree.  All of the blocks won’t fit in the space so it will be much larger than shown here plus I don’t have the pieced border yet either.  Where Bonnie suggested gold, I used a Civil War cheddar colored fabric.  Where she suggested green, I used dark blues and some purples. 

This quilt has been a HUGE challenge for me.  I am a person who usually doesn’t rip out my stitches but for this quilt, I ripped out a LOT.  On the first page of instructions, Bonnie said it is really important to check your seam allowance…I didn’t.  UGH!  I sew on a Bernina that has a quarter inch foot with a side bar on it.  I had just made the assumption that if I butted the fabric next to the bar, I was sewing at a quarter inch.  WRONG!!!!  I actually had a larger seam allowance which does bad things to the diagonal of a triangle.  At first, I let a few less than perfect points slide by…but then I decided…I am old enough to know better…and old enough to learn from my mistakes so, I took seam ripper in hand and started fixing things. 

Right now, the quilt looks pretty busy to me.  I am hoping the borders calm it down…Bonnie has suggested that the next part of the mystery will be reveiled this weekend and so my mystery continues…..