I almost never do mystery quilts for many reasons, but I have liked what I’ve seen and done from previous mysteries by Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr of Modern Quilt Studio. Of course, I signed up for those AFTER the quilts were revealed, so I knew what they would look like. This one, for example:

Here’s a Modern Quilt Studio quilt I made in 2024.

Last fall I was looking for something fun to end 2025 and signed up for Modern Quilt Studio’s Matchmaker mystery when it started–meaning it really was a mystery.

Well! I was only partly finished with my blocks when the final quilt was revealed and I didn’t care for it!!!  Here’s a link to one of the finished samples. Those rows were too lined-up-and-regular for my taste. The blocks were interesting, the quilt not so much.

So now I have all these beautiful blocks that I am NOT going to put into that design. And there are other blocks I didn’t even make.

The current plan is to combine some of these into composite blocks of various sizes and go from there. One of the things I recall from basic design class is that each component of a composition should be a good composition in itself, so I’m trying to make composite blocks that look good on their own. Then we’ll see how they go together. Here are a few block combinations I’m trying out.

I love these big dancing blocks, so will leave them as they are:

And here’s my initial idea for layout, primarily because I thought the dancing blocks could lend structure by going diagonally through the middle.

I thought it needed help, so some friends came the other day, and we worked on it some more to make bigger groups.

That’s still not it, but we’re getting there. I like the color choices and the individual blocks, so this will NOT be a UFO forever! Stay tuned…

We seem to be trying to have a real winter here in the south! We got about 10 inches of snow over last weekend, so you know what I did.

We got 10.5″ of snow!

I dug out these little blocks I had started as leaders and enders a couple of years ago. I had about 100 of them, but they finished at 4″, so I needed a lot more of something for a quilt.

These are just a few of the little blocks I had made up

When I finish a quilt I cut my scraps into strips of standard widths from 1.5″ to 4.5″ and store them in little drawers by size. I decided to use some of those to enlarge the blocks.

These blocks have the first round of additional strips; some blocks got two rounds

Eventually I ran out of precut strips in the purple and blue color family. Also, these blocks were looking awfully BUSY. So I decided to set them with alternate plain blocks.

Finished top, about 62″ x 72″

And here it is. This will go to my friend who quilts our tops for Flying Horse Farms. I’m getting pretty close to my goal on tops for them for the first half of the year!

We had snow toward the end of January, and thank goodness it wasn’t too much, BUT I got a couple of snow/sew days!

A friend of mine made the Smidge pattern, by Villa Rosa Designs, and I liked it.

So I drew a larger version, 60″ x 70″, to make it suitable for donation. I drew it in EQ8, and the program figured yardage for me.

Luckily, I had the necessary fabric left over from a previous project. For starters, here’s the previous quilt:

There are many chandelier quilt patterns out there, but this one was free on the Free Spirit website

And here’s one more quilt that used that same fabric collection. I guess I really liked that fabric!

Finished top is about 61″ x 71″

And here’s my version of Smidge, now 60″ x 70″.

I changed the name of this quilt to Blips for my version

This is just a top. It will be passed on to my friend who quilts our tops for Flying Horse Farms and then delivers them for us! This was quick, easy, and fun. I recommend either the original pattern or drafting your own version.