A Finish and a Start

It's been two weeks since my last design wall post.  Last week was just nuts, I worked on Sunday and had to go in to work early on Monday. There just wasn't the mental bandwidth to do much posting last week. Thankfully I'm off all this week. I'm hoping to get in some good stitching time and catch up on emails and blog reading.  

Before the work madness got geared up, the label and binding for 2019 Christmas Mystery Quilt was finished.  

2019 Christmas Mystery, designed by Carrie Randall (Quilter's Hideaway)
Started: October 13, 2019, Finished: November 8, 2020

This quilt was started last October. It was the third annual Christmas quilt along offered by the local quilt shop. I didn't do the first one, but did the 2018 version and then last year did this one. The theme for this year's mystery didn't thrill me, so that made it easy to keep with my plan to just start three quilts this year.   

Trudy used gold thread and did a swirly holly thing as the motif. 

This Christmas light block shows off the quilting.  

I'm not sure where this one is going. I kept last year's version to use this year.  This one may go live with my sister. She usually decorates her kitchen with gingerbread men, so this quilt would fit right in.  

That's the finish, now for the start.  Well it's not actually a start, yet. Bonnie Hunter posted the fabric requirements for this year's mystery, Grassy Creek, at the end of last month. I don't usually get serious about fabric selection till the week before the mystery starts. That was last week, so I opened the fabric closet and started playing.  

I'm a cool color person and most of my quilts reflect that preference. Bonnie's color choices this year are decidedly warm.  I don't have a lot of stash in those colors, but I was able to pull together collection that matches her color palette fairly well. 

If I go this route, I'd change out the lighter yellow green for the darker green I used in this second color palette. 

The gray and whites are the same between the two color palettes. All of those fabrics are left overs from previous projects. The red and orange in the first palette are left overs. The dark and light purples in the second color palette are left overs from previous projects.  The first color palette is better balanced across the tonal ranges, the second is less so as the pink and light purple read about the same color density in black and white.  

I have till Friday to figure out the color palette.  So it may be one of these two or I may tweak on it all week and come up with something completely different.  

Linking up with Monday Making and Design Wall Monday. Happy stitching this week.