Wednesday, November 29, 2017

As If One Mystery Is Not Enough, There's Still En Provence Too!

Bonnie Hunters latest mystery is "On Ringo Lake" and I've joined in on the fun.  This will be my third Bonnie project but only my second time doing one of her mysteries.  In fact, I'll be working on both of them at the same time: when I decided to jump into “Ringo Lake” (pun intended!),  I decided that it was also high time I tried to finish up “En Provence” which was last year's mystery.


I had started in on it late and had the usual ambitious plans to catch up and get it done before the end of summer.  Needless to say THAT didn't happen!  It's okay though, fortunately these projects are not a race and don't need to meet a deadline -- other than maybe having it finished before the NEXT mystery is released next year!

When I was on line waiting to get fabric cut for "Ringo Lake", I had a conversation with the woman standing behind me about this very same thing.  She saw my piles of bolts and when I said it was for an online mystery, we realized we were both big Bonnie fans!  She mentioned that she had never tried one of the mysteries thinking them hard to do because of all the pieces.  I told her that the parts themselves are usually very simple units so the only real “challenge” is keeping everything organized and setting yourself up to sew a little at a time to get them done.  Bonnie's quilts are like any other quilt project:  it may not get done fast but if you keep plugging at 'em, they'll eventually get done.   Bonnie's personal projects are a testament to that.  We both marveled at how many she gets done even while traveling!

As for “En Provence”:  I had finished up most of the block units for it back in February during a couple of the Quilt-A-Thons Judy Laquidara at Patchwork Times had held at the beginning of the year.


I left off needing to make the decision on the one “constant” fabric to be used in the Tri-Rec sashing units in that project.  It was supposed to be a mauve and I had two: a really strong tone-on-tone and a softer one with Polka Dots.


While I liked the boldness of the tone-on-tone and believed it would help it stand out among all the noise of the scrappiness, I had used a lot of polka dot prints in the block piecing so admit I was partial to using that in the sashing too.  I was also a smidge short of what was called for with the tone-on-tone (which had come from stash) and didn't want to take the chance I'd run out and knew I couldn't get more.  So I made a couple of test units with the polka dots and since I didn't hate them, I've decided to move forward with that after all.  So I've been piecing these units together leader/ender while working on “Ringo” and another project I have going:
 
 
I'm also finally starting to lay out the block and sashing units on the design wall. If I'm pleased with how it looks, I can also leader/ender those together as I continue with my other sewing. 


And believe it or not, even with all of this going on there is still more to come soon.

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