Mystery Quilts! Quilts in Magazines! Panel Quilt Kits!

These are all so much fun, and create such fun opportunities for me to figure out what fabrics we can put into these fabric packages.

But none is quite as fun and as challenging as the yearly Bonnie Hunter mystery quilt.

Here I am, armed with all my “guides” to getting our fabric packages for the Grassy Creek Mystery pack “correct.”

Each year on Oct. 31, early in the morning, she puts up a blog post spelling out what colors are going to be in this year’s Mystery Quilt. She includes color card names and images from Lowe’s as well as pictures from her own stash, that she’s pulled and put together as workable samples, that often seem to stray quite a bit from the color cards from Lowe’s. But, in all reality, the samples show really how far you can vary on either side of the cards and still have a “viable” color scheme.

In preparation for this year’s reveal of colors, we had ordered in thousands of yards of neutrals, which are always needed, and hundreds of yards of blues, which had gotten totally wiped out during the Pandemic mask making craze.

By the way, that’s slowed down to ALMOST nothing now, for us, in case you were wondering. Very few people are still making them and buying fabric and elastic from us. We’ve found that MOST quilters are pointing “askers” to head to Walmart or Amazon and buy them for themselves, as they are “sick and tired of” making them, and want to get back to the creativity that comes from quilt making, table topper making and wall hanging creating.

(The funny thing is that there are zero blues in this year’s fabric package.)

So, on Saturday, Oct. 31, when we found the post on Quiltville, telling the colors, I immediately stopped working on orders for that Saturday morning open store day, and made up the entry for the site. At 8:30 a.m. Ken had headed to Lowe’s to get me the paint color cards, so we could get started. He then stapled them to the business card, so that if someone wants to use it in the store, they won’t lose the color cards!

Then, the studying of the colors and the pictures and the samples started. I printed out the entire post in color, so that I could study her samples. Later in the week, when someone else made up an official hand-picked kit, I studied that, after printing it out in color.

I picked and pulled and came up with what seemed like hundreds of bolts. In all reality, it was probably only 50 or 60 bolts. In the meantime, life was progressing, and I was busily helping with orders, and open store, and not starting the cutting of the packs!

Finally Friday afternoon arrived. I had promised that I would start shipping the packs in “about a week.”

That meant that I had to get started cutting.

We had cleared out the back room so that I could concentrate on that and that alone.

I printed out a guide, and decided to put the grays and reds in one bundle and the other colors in a second pack, making the whole process more manageable!

Thankfully, we have a 24 foot table, so I can work pretty efficiently.

What stunning colors!

Here you can see their brilliance

The hardest part is figuring out which fabrics will look the best together, making sure that I’m not putting like patterns into the same pack. Then, after I stack it all out, I cut it up. Then comes the fabric roll.

Then we bag it all, tag it and eventually, we’ll get these taken to the post office!

All in all, the process of making a fabric pack or a mystery quilt or magazine quilt bundle is in the preparedness. If you have the fabrics on hand, it’s not too hard. The hard part is if you do not have enough fabrics to use!

Since this particular quilt color scheme has been well received, we have already had to contact some of our suppliers and get additional fabrics ordered!

Well, it’s a great problem to have!

So, take a look at these kits and see if you like them! They are a beautiful combination of colors!