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…