Midnight Mystery Wrap Up

More progress on wrapping up some UFO quilts...

Midnight Mystery, Finishes 70" x 70"

My latest finish was started in June 2015 as part of Cheryl Brickey's (Meadow Mist Designs) 2015-2016 Midnight Mystery Quilt Along.  This was my first time participating in an online mystery quilt along and Cheryl does a fantastic job of breaking down the quilt into monthly installations and creating a fun online community where participants shared their progress.  Each month, I followed along and stayed on schedule up through the March 2016 final quilt top reveal parade.  Only a picture of the quilt top was required to be eligible for prizes but I had hoped to have it quilted as well and got started on stitching in the ditch and some echo quilting.  Ironically, had I not been so eager to get started on the quilting, this quilt would have been completed over a year ago as I won free quilting by Jan Briggs of Quilting Among the Groves in the reveal parade!!  Since I had already started some of the quilting on my Midnight Mystery quilt top, I opted to have him quilt a different quilt instead. 

Last December, I resumed quilting the charcoal background with some zig zag meander using Gray (#2605)  Aurifil 50-weight and my new Juki TL-2010Q machine but got stumped on how best to quilt the floating stars (especially the magenta border).  So, it was banished back into UFO status.  A week or so ago, I revisited this UFO and resolved to complete it by the end of the year.  The magental borders were still stumping me so I focused on the blue squares and chartreuse stars instead.  Spring Green (#1231) Aurifil 50-weight was used to stitch 4-5 rays into each of the teal squares, followed by zig zag meander inside the star (and took between 5-6 bobbins to complete all 9 stars!!).  Once again, I was stumped on how to quilt the magenta border. 

Saving Those Magenta Borders for Last!

After some doodling, I was ready to jump in and knock out the last of the quilting with some flame quilting with Light Magenta (2588) Aurifil, which added some beautiful texture and was fairly easy to fill in around each of the starry centers.

Detail of Quilting

Fun Plaid Prints Used in the Quilt Back

Some remaining Geranium Kona yardage was pieced with two fun bright plaids that matched the colors in my top (all found in my stash!!  Luckily I had the wisdom to prep enough binding in advance using matching Chartreuse Kona and completed the machine stitched binding Christmas eve, making this UFO finish an early Christmas miracle!!

I still have another Mystery Quilt Along (Cheryl's 2016-2017 Meadow Mystery) in the UFO queue, but I am going to try to knock out some of the smaller quilts in my queue instead.  Progress has been steady so let's hope I can continue my UFO completition streak!!