Grand Illusion Mystery Quilt

Last spring I somehow came across Bonnie Hunter's mystery quilt, Celtic Solstice.  I saw that the instructions would soon come down and I downloaded them.  I ended up buying one of her books for the previous mystery quilt, which I also liked.  I made a mental note to do the mystery quilt this year.
In October she posted the paint chips to use a guide for the colors of the material.  I was at Lowe's that day getting the colors.  I started buying material that weekend.  It was really hard to find the blue/aqua color and I didn't buy all that I needed.  It wasn't until I was doing the first clue that I realized I still needed 1/2 a yd.  I wrote on the paint chips how much material I bought of each color at what store.  I took pictures with the fabric and the receipt (or something that tied it to that store) so I could easily know where to go to if I wanted more of a material.


Here's the thing, the first clue is posted the day after Thanksgiving.  A much better way to spend Black Friday than shopping in my opinion, but I didn't start then because we had company, I needed to decorate the house for Christmas and then there were those Christmas cards I had to finish and get in the mail.

I started 2 days after Christmas on a Saturday and worked like crazy to get all the clues done by the reveal, which came a day early.

 Clue 1 - 100 broken dish units and 80 half square triangles
 Clue 2 - 100 double diamond units
 Clue 3 - 120 units
 Clue 4 - 40 of each broken dish unit (note the pink/white are reversed)
Clue 5 - 4 of the pink blocks and 25 of the blue blocks
 Clue 6 - Putting together 25 of these squares (12-1/2")

Clue - (no picture) we had to sew 2 of the rectangles from clue 3 together (black in the center) and cut 36 squares from the aqua fabric.

This next picture is before the borders are sewn on.  I have to be honest, when I saw the reveal picture, I wasn't jazzed with it.  It looked like some sort of a pixelated image and I was disappointed.  Now that it is done, I'm quite happy with it.  It is bold and bright. 
I'm binding it with pink.  I am still hand-stitching it to the back but it is pieced and I quilted it Saturday.

If you want to download the instructions you can find them HERE.  I thought she took them down June 1st but in some post, it is mentioned that it will come off of the blog to be published sometime in the spring.  

I'm happy to be starting 2015 off with a completed queen-sized quilt. 
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