Mystery Step One

Bonnie Hunter released the first clue of this year's mystery last night just before bed-time. So of course I spent time thinking about the quilt when I should have been asleep.

This year as well as choosing my own colours (here's the post about that), using metric measurements, and only making a quarter of the pieces, I'm making another change; I'm making the individual units larger. Bonnie bases lots of her quilts on 3" pieces, which translates to 7.5cms. That's not a problem, but making pieces that finish half that size (which she often does) involves cutting in quarter centimetre increments, and that doesn't thrill me. So I've decided that where Bonnie uses 3 inches, I will use 8cms. It's not  big difference, but half of 8 is a lot easier to deal with than half of 7.5.

So on to the sewing!

I like to use the Magic 8 method to make my half-square triangle blocks, but I wanted to get lots of variation so I adapted the method. So that I would get two sets of four matching blocks from each "magic 8", instead of eight all the same, here's what I did:

This was my test piece to make sure it would work. I cut a square from the brown fabric (my constant), but rectangles half the size from two neutrals. Here's the result of that test:

That worked well, so I continued on the same way and made a few more:

They went together quickly. And I've made a note of what size I cut them in case I need to make more at the end.

When Bonnie activates the link-up on Monday, I'll add the link here so that you can check out everyone else's mystery bits!
Here's the first link-up.