New Fabric

Thursday was such a happy day. I got a box of fabric from Fat Quarter Shop for two quilts and a box from my MIL full of Halloween goodies. My excitement level was about equal with the fabric box coming out slightly ahead (come on, it's 5.7 pounds of fabric.) When I got home from work my husband and I were digging through the boxes and discovered she sent us individually wrapped peeps!!! I didn't even know they made Halloween peeps let alone individually wrapped ones. The glare on the wrappers is too harsh so there's no pictures of them. :-(

Happily the fabric has no glare so I can share photos of what I got. Every year my quilt guild does a challenge and a mystery quilt. This year they even let me plan the challenge quilt! I might be driving some of them a bit nuts with my loose rules, but I want everyone to have fun. When I announced the challenge I handed out paint chips and participants must find fabrics that match at least three of the colors on their paint chips. Fabrics can be prints so long as the colors on their prints match the colors on their paint chips. We're also able to use neutrals such as black, white, and grey. 

I'm not completely sold on the two fabrics furthest to the right. They lean a little more towards the red scale than the purpley pink I was hoping for. I've decided one of the things I'm adding to my Christmas list is a color card from Kona. I'm really embracing using solids and can't wait to get a swatch of all of fabric colors Kona offers.

I attempted to participate in the mystery quilt along the first year I joined the guild. I did okay with altering the fabric (i did a two-step process of bleaching and then when it was too light coffee stain), embellishing the fabric with quilting, cutting the fabric into seven pieces and reassembling, and adding beads and buttons. My mystery quilt was turning into this cute little bookcase runner with 7 owls. Then the last step instructed us to turn our fabric into a vessel. I couldn't figure out how to turn my bookcase runner into a vessel and the beading on my owl wings was becoming ridiculous. My owl runner currently languishes in UFO purgatory. I have trouble calling projects UFO because in my mind if I intend to finish it and have a plan of when it will be worked back into the schedule/finished it's still a WIP. To refer to the owl runner as a UFO tells you that their hopes of being finished are zilch. 

This year's mystery quilt we've already been told will finish as a quilt. Our guild makes Comfort Quilts for the DA to hand out to victims of violent crimes and their families, and to an organization that assists women and children leaving domestic violence situations. This year's organizers have planned a quilt that will finish 50"x76" which is one of the requested sizes for comfort quilts. We aren't required to give away our quilts, but I've decided my mystery quilt this year will be a Comfort Quilt. 

I forgot to ask when they handed out the first step, but I'll talk to the organizers of the Mystery Quilt and see if I can share the steps here.