Who Knows How a Mystery Goes?

 It's that time of year when  the weather starts cool,

snow is in the future,

and we all start to think about hibernating.

Yes it's mystery time!

Our guild is doing a mystery quilt and 

I'm going to do mine Scrappy.

The clue master assured us that it will look very nice

using scrappy fabrics. Clues come out every 

three weeks.  Just saw the first sewing portion today!

So glad I purchase the Perfectly Slotted trimmer set 

with a portion of my retreat door prize !

Three colors and one background fabric are the 

requirements from the invitation. 

The second clue gave us a hint that there 

may be a lot of half squares,

but with hundreds of patterns for half square settings,

 who knows what it will be?

So here are the three color families I have chosen.

The scrap universe decreed that the most 

scraps win so my colors are:

1.5 m  of green scraps

2 m  of blue scraps  

.7m of red. 

Featured as part of the Monday morning 

Get Goin' Sewn' will be cutting a 

stack of parts for each color family,

100 ~ 4" x 4" of each color and the backgrounds.

That GGS club sounds like a winner!  I 

have a few quilters I will invite to join me Monday

morning to stitch!

Now, back to the mystery!

I'll be using beige and white scraps. 

Then a big stack of 3 1/2" x 3 1/2"

of everything. 

Thank you world for rotary cutters!

This project should relieve the stress on my overfull

scrap drawers. 

The chunk stacks will also get a break if 

I dice up some them for the mystery units!

The box of 4" squares can 

be sorted too!  

I have 2 young helpers 

I can enlist to pile up the color families!

Have a great week stitching!

Oh , we are off to school, not the fabric store!

Stay safe and sew on!

Linking up with:

Design Wall Monday

Sew & Tell

Monday Musings

Sunday Stash Report

Thread, thread , what to do , what to do!

 Since my recent inheritance of a quantity of thread,

(not really inheritance but it sounds so cool),

I'm having a bit of trouble deciding 

how to store it, display it, sort it etc.

It's currently in about four places in the sewing workroom,

Since there's an OCD individual residing inside of every  quilter,

I'm having a great time figuring 

out what to do and playing with it all.

So, in a little break between stitching the Irish chain tops, 

 I sorted out all the spools that were still in their new packaging.

Then I pulled out everything that I currently

 been storing in Ziploc baggies.

I saw this being done by a fellow quilter 

at a retreat and thought it was a great idea.

All the shades of the color can be seen at a glance.

It makes sourcing that perfect match much speedier.

You can also tell where you're lacking in variety.

Then I took a cruise of the drawers where I gently placed

(crammed) a bunch of the Legacy thread

Can you see the Little Treasures here?

Ten wooden spools. 

My BB collects these and saves them in antique jars.

I think I may be overwhelming her if I give her all I'm finding.

Some of the more interesting colors,

 I wind onto bobbins to save for my use.

Leaving a bit of color on the spool makes a wonderful display.

I do the old "take a big piece between your hands and yank" test,

to see if the thread is still viable.

It's certainly not an engineering tensile 

test but it seems to work for me. If it is at all

weak, fragile, excessively linty, it goes off to

the crafty bin for use in kid's pictures.

I also pulled out and reviewed

my travel case of smaller spools.

 One small sewing room Bandit,

likes to organize these by color every time 

he visits and wants to play downstairs.

This little case goes to retreats 

and sewing days to provide backup for my 

main color selection.

Some quilters find certain machines 

only perform well with specific threads.

So far, the mishmash of thread I 

use has worked well. I find difficulty 

only with thicker threads. Usually a 

needle change does the trick. 

My new sewing room buddy is calling me!

Stay safe and sew on !!