My first mystery!

Finals will wrap up Sunday night and thank goodness this semester will be OVER! I'm so ready to be done and get back to some quilting, especially with stuff I still want to make for Christmas gifts. I've enrolled for Spring semester, but only one class, so hopefully it won't get nearly as crazy as this semester did! Now that I'm going to get a nearly month-long break, we'll see how organized I get. I certainly have plenty of projects I'd like to get to! Plus, with the cold hitting the entire country, I'm ready to stay in and stitch! We had our first dusting of snow. It was such a dry snow that it all blew away by today, but we're supposed to get more on Sunday. Maybe...

The view out my upstairs sewing room window.

My friend Shirley told me that the date of month of the first snow (in our case the 5th of December) indicates how many snows we will have this winter. I asked if this meant days, and if so, I was okay with that! Just 5 days of snow for the rest of the winter would be awesome! Unfortunately she replied that it is 5 snow storms, that may last 1-5 or more days. Well rats. I liked it the other way. However, if we can get away with 5 snows like this one with narry a dusting, I'd be okay with that too. My snow shovel can stay in the garage unused as far as I'm concerned!

In the meantime, I'm diving into my very first mystery quilt! I've joined Bonnie Hunter's Celtic Solstice Mystery. Most of the group started with Clue #1 last Friday, but I've been buried in finals. Today, Clue #2 was released and I have yet to cut into a single piece of fabric, but I know I'm not alone. From what I've learned so far, there are hundreds (thousands?) of quilters from around the world in on this mystery that will take ~6 months. I've pulled my fabrics from my stash, purchased just 3 FQ's in each of the four colors on a recent shop hop to mix & match for the scrappy look, grabbed some neutrals out of my stash, and am just about ready to cut my first pieces. I'm going to be using an Aurifil 50 neutral to piece this entire quilt. My machines and I love working with Aurifil!

Who knows whether it will actually be completed within the six months or not, but at least I'm giving it a shot and am using my stash as much as possible to use up random fabrics that haven't fit into other projects so far.

I find it interesting that I (anyone else out there?) continue to buy FQs, but then they just collect in the drawer. I guess they are meant to be in scrappy quilts and I'm just starting to get into that arena. I have plenty of fuel to build those fires. LOL! Now to let go of those FQs or scraps and bless & release them into a scrappy project.

While I do have a sewing room upstairs, I'll be working on the Singer 301A that I learned on as a kid. This was my auntie's machine that she taught me to sew on. It went from Auntie to my mom to me to my older daughter and now back to me. I LOVE having it sitting in my kitchen so I can sew while Jacob plays. Now that he's getting bigger (18 months already!) he plays nicely and I can actually do something while he's here three days a week. Let's hope I can keep this baby humming now that school is about out!

I'm heading downstairs to make my first cuts and assemble the first of many, many blocks for this project. If you don't see me here for a while, know that I'm happily cutting and sewing blocks for my own Celtic Solstice Mystery!

More snippets from the sewing room soon,
Liz