Mystery Quilt Day

Yesterday I spent the day working on a Mystery Quilt with about 50 other ladies from the Frisco Quilt Guild, which I recently joined. For those of you who don't know what a Mystery Quilt is:

A Mystery Quilt is a quilting project that remains a mystery up until the quilt is finished or until the participants figure it out.

Participants are given instructional "clues" and have no idea what the outcome is going to be. It is usually a small, fairly easy project that is completed in stages over an extended period of time; the time determined by the author of the mystery. Most often, participants are informed as to the approximate final sizes and also the theme, if there is one.

We were not informed of how large this quilt was going to be, but it will probably turn out to be a good full size quilt.

Anyway, when I showed up at the hotel where we had rented one of the meeting rooms, I was completely amazed. Mind you, when I go to a class or a retreat or somewhere that I know I won't have the luxury to spread out, I take only my small sewing machine, a small cutting mat, the essential notions (rotary cutter, scissors, bobbins, small rulers, etc.), and sometimes I'll bring my portable lamp. I walked into this room and saw 50 women with a complete individual sewing space set up. They had brought their machines, their irons, portable ironing boards, extra table to spread out on, lamps, and some of them even brought their own chairs. Now I can appreciate wanting to do this in comfort but it was like none of them even considered the space that they would be taking up and/or the encroachment onto their neighbors. AND, nobody thought that when you get 50 individual irons plugged in, 50 individual lamps plugged in, 50 individual sewing machines plugged in, and 50 individual women of a certain age all having hot flashes what the temperature in that room would become...oh, and we kept blowing fuses in the room. I was crazy, and yet a lot of fun. They provided lunch for us and lots of people had snacks to share. And some of the women accomplished quite a bit.

I was slightly challenged at one point and didn't get nearly as much done as I had hoped, but luckily when I realized I had sewn 60 squares the wrong way, a couple of really nice ladies grabbed the mistakes and started helping me unsew all of them. The women who got more blocks completed were ones that did things in stages, I personally am a 'complete all of step one before going on to step two' kind of person. Therefore, I have all of my pieces ready to go, I just need to put them together to make the blocks and then the blocks laid out and into the quilt. However, none of this will happen until after I get moved and settled into Casa ABBA in 2.5 weeks.

Therefore, my accomplishment for 9 hours of sewing is:

Only 29 more to go and I'll have a whole quilt!! When finished, I'll post the complete picture.