Moving It Forward Monday: Preparing For the Quiltville Mystery Season

It's almost here!!  The first clue for Bonnie Hunter's latest mystery quilt "Indigo Way" will drop this Friday.  For this year's mystery season, I'll just be gathering the clues for the new mystery because I want to spend the season working on all the mystery tops I already have finished.  The goal is to move them all into the "fully finished" category (sorry, that's the cross stitch talking!).  

I have four mystery tops and their backings already prepared:

Clockwise from top left:  En Provence, On Ringo Lake, Old Tobacco Road
and Double Delight

All I have left to add to that list is "Roll, Roll, Cotton Boll".  This project has had a looong journey that started all the way back in 2018.

I scavenged fabric from the remains of other projects to make up all the parts for the blocks for it from December 2018 to June, 2020.

At this point, the String blocks on the left were still "in progress".

All the parts in the upper right in the picture above were sewn together into blocks back in March of this year.

During the holiday season last year, I worked on the string pieced units (using strings collected from projects and cuts offs over the years).  I finished up the String blocks for this project in February this year. 

I was finally able to lay out all the blocks on my design wall in July but didn't get to sew all the blocks together to finish the center of the top until the end of October.

Since September, I added the triangles on the ends for the outer border units as "leader/enders" and just finished those up this month.  

So now it was time to trim up the edges of the center in prep for adding the next inner border which will be green.

Bonnie gives a size to cut the inner border strips but she also suggests that the border can also function as a "spacing border".  So I may find I need to adjust the width of my inner border to fit what I need to bridge the sides of the center with the length of the pieced outer border strips. 

After trimming and stay stitching the edges, I've measured the length and width through the center as I do when I measure out my borders.  However, following Bonnie's advice, before cutting the inner border, I am focusing first on sewing up those outer borders, both to make sure the number of pieces she gave for that works and then to see if the inner border width in the pattern will work with them or need to be adjusted.

Well, this is going to take a while, LOL!  Good thing I've got until the end of the week!