7 Days of New Years --- Day 5: Quiltville Mystery Catch-up and Still More Quilting

 With Christmas barreling down on me last week, I missed checking in on the Chilhowie mystery!

In last week's Part 5, the mystery quilters had reached an exciting milestone:  they were starting to assemble the units from the previous parts to make blocks!  Always a big deal when you reach that part of one of Bonnie's mysteries. This week for Part 6 they are cutting squares that will be added to HST units previously made in Part 4.  Those pieces will be added on to the Part 5 blocks to create even larger blocks!

I used this check in period to take a break from the quilting I've been doing to go back to making string blocks for "Roll, Roll Cotton Boll" and "Cherry Crunch".

I spent a few hours and got a few more done for each project.  With New Year's coming this weekend, it also means the mystery period is almost over.  Even though I will continue work on both of these projects once the mystery ends, I would love to have the string block portions for both finished as this year comes to a close.   

That done, I also decided to get a something else I've had sitting with the string stash sewn up quick.

For the longest I had this pattern by Sandra Dennison of Gray Barn Designs sitting with my Halloween project stash.  Once I started the RRCB string blocks, I realized I could also take some of the strips to make it up.  I hit the Halloween stash today for potential backings (the spider web print won!).  It's finished quilt-as-you-go and now it's done!  Well except for the binding which is picked out and cut.  

Like the eyes?  What's cool is those are die cut (with fusible attached) from a die I had wanted for a while and was finally able to pick up during one of Accuquilt's holiday sales.  

The mummy's eyes are the foot pads and eyes of the Teddy Bear on this die.  I bought the die in anticipation of making some custom baby quilts but it's always great when a die can do double duty!  

That done, it was back to quilting the 9 Fat Quarter Disappearing Nine Patch quilt. 

I got the straight lines done on the light sections which is also the last of the walking foot quilting.  The next part is the scary part:  doing free-motion quilting on all the remaining sections.  Actually, since I have quilting plans for all of them that isn't the scary part.  The scary part is that I've never really done free-motion quilting on my Singer 401.  I've seen Karen Miller's articles and webinars on doing FMQ on my Featherweight so might wind up either changing over to that machine or just put my Brother Nouvelle mid-arm back in the table since I've done a lot of FMQ on that machine.   But not tonight!  DH took the night off from work and we've got a bunch of "The West Wing" episodes on the DVR so will try to watch a few before heading to bed.  

One more day to go before New Year's.  Are you ready for 2023?