Grassy Creek – The Quiltville Mystery

Participating in the Quiltville Mystery Quilt-along has quickly become a tradition for me.  I’m only on my second year of quilting along, but it’s so much fun I can’t imagine not doing it each year. 

Before I walk you through each of the clues, and the little tweaks I made to some of them, let me tell you about my color scheme.  You can read about it in more detail in this How to Pick Colors and Prints for a Quilt tutorial, but the short story is this:

The original color palette given by Bonnie Hunter, the author of Quiltville mysteries was fall colors: reds, oranges, golds, parakeet greens as well as gray and neutral.  Those aren’t my colors, so I played around with the palette and ended up keeping the oranges and greens but making them more of a coral/peach and minty/jade than the traditional fall leaf colors of orange and green.  I kept my version of green as green in the pattern, and substituted my oranges for gold.  I substituted purple for red and a middle blue for orange.  I also stuck with gray as the pattern calls for and am using whites and some blacks/blues on whites as my neutrals.

I will not offer the number of units needed for each clue, nor any of the sizes.  I even tried to use fabric backdrops for my photos so that you couldn’t see the ruler lines on my cutting map.  Bonne Hunter has all of these clues for free on her blog, but they are only there for a limited time before it becomes a pattern for purchase.  I believe the date they stop being free is around February 10^th.  Go get them now so you have them for a future project!

Now, on to the quilt itself! 

1.  Half Square Triangles

Clue number one was half square triangles.  I’ve written several half square triangles tutorials, so I’m not going to go through the details again, but you can definitely brush up on your HST skills, using squares of any size, by reading through my tutorial.

I hate trimming units to get rid of the dog ears (those are the little triangle flaps on the edges), but have found that trimming them two at a time makes them go twice as fast, and if it makes an unpleasant task go twice as fast, then it’s only half as unpleasant. 

How to trim two at a time?  Right sides together, nestle the diagonal seams together as tightly as possible, and then trim as usual, but twice as fast!

2. Quarter Square Triangles

A quarter square triangle is a mouthful, but it’s just what it sounds like: a square that has been cut into 4 quadrants, with the cuts going through the diagonals. 

Somewhere in the back of my mind is this idea that I once learned how to make quarter square triangles (QSTs) in a quick way, I think it might involve sewing down two opposite sides of a square before cutting the square along the diagonal, but I’m a little fuzzy on the process and definitely don’t remember any of the math involved.  I did make it one of my 2021 Quilting Goals to learn this, or more accurately, to re-learn this trick, but this clue is what led to that goal, so it’s not mastered yet.

What I did find for this clue, so that I wasn’t sewing tiny little bits, was this cool tutorial to make half square triangles like this:

and then place them together, right sides together, and pretend to make half square triangles a second time, drawing the line from corner to corner to catch both fabrics in the original HST.

Sew on either side of the line, just like a normal HST, and then trim along the line. 

This only works on quarter square triangles that have two neutral sections directly across from each other, or when none of the fabric placements matter, but it worked out well for Clue 2 and saved me from sewing on the bias with tiny little bits of fabric.

3.  Tricky Triangles

The clue 3 unit was titled tricky triangles, although I bet there is an actual quilting term for this shape.

I made my units slightly different than Bonnie’s directions, but not so differently that I don’t feel comfortable sharing.

The tricky triangles unit suggests making the purple and neutral center by cutting a square into four triangles, the cutting lines are shown in purple.

Then, after cutting, sew each unit along the long side, shown by the bright blue line.

I did the exact opposite.  It’s hard to see the white thread on the white fabric, but I sewed around all 4 sides of the square and then cut it afterwards.

• 

• 

Either way, you end up with cute, little purple and neutral Tricky Triangle centers.

{Photo 3.7}

The blue “wings” are then added to the centers to create the Tricky Triangle which reminded me of flying geese, even though they really aren’t the same shape at all.

4.  Tricky Triangles Part Two

I didn’t take any photos of clue 4 in progress, but the clue used the Tricky Triangles from Clue 3 and added neutral and gray triangles to create this fun rectangle block.

I’m really excited to see how these units work out in the quilt, because I’ve never seen anything like this before and I really like it!

5.  9-Patches, Flying Geese and Some Extra Cutting

Clue 5 actually had three separate parts to it, so it was kind of like three weeks of clues all rolled into one, but without any of them being too taxing.  This clue came out on the day after Christmas when I had a post-holiday celebration that involved lots of sewing, lots and lots of coffee and staying in my pajamas all day.

The clue started with itty bitty 9-patches in neutral and green with blue centers.  I liked my blue fabrics in clue 3 as well, but this is the clue when I really started to think I had made a good choice subbing in blue instead of fall leaf orange.

The second part of Clue 5 was flying geese, which I made 4 at a time, like in this Flying Geese tutorial.  The thing I liked about these flying geese was that after lots of clues that instructed us to make 4 matching sets of many things, not only were we not making matching sets of flying geese, we were actually instructed to make our flying geese units with scrappy (i.e.: not matching) neutral corners.

These are by far the scrappiest flying geese I’ve also made, and they’re also the littlest.  I can’t tell you the sizes, but they are so little I started calling them “weeny geese” as I was working on them.  Maybe flying goslings (cause they’re babies, get it?) is a better term, but I think I’ll stick with weeny, it just suits them.

The last part of Clue 5 didn’t involve any sewing, but was just cutting a bunch of purple rectangles and squares for a future clue.  Since the rectangles are the same size as the weeny geese, I’m guessing they will either go above or below the goose unit to make a square, but I also think that might be so obvious a guess that Bonnie actually has something else planned.

6.  Strings Upon Strings

Clue 6 came with two different options.  The finished size was the same either way, but the pattern directions told us to

Either cut them as one large piece

Or, make them super scrappy by string piecing, which means lots and lots of long, skinny strips sewn together to equal the larger size.

But, I’m a little bit ornery, and didn’t like either option.  So, I split the difference and made my pieces from three squares.  That will make the finished quilt a little scrappier, and kept me busier sewing the weekend of clue six than if I’d just cut large pieces, but not so time consuming as the string piecing.

There are other units within the quilt that are the same dimension as these three squares that make up the larger rectangle, so I’m hopeful it will work out within the pattern as a whole.  Time will tell.

The other part of clue 6 is to use little white squares to cover the corners of the gray rectangles. 

I’m hoping we’ll see some sort of star design in the sashing corners, but I don’t think the math quite works out.  I can dream though, right?  And not just dream.  If Grassy Creek doesn’t have secondary star design in the sashing, I can certainly write a pattern that does!

7. The Big Reveal!

This is only my second mystery quilt, so I had no idea what to expect regarding the length of the mystery, but I was pleasantly surprised on the Friday morning of Clue 7 to open up the clue and find the big reveal, showing how to put the pieces from Clues 1-6 together, along with a few new pieces to create the quilt top.

The center of the quilt blocks uses the quarter square triangles from Clue 2, the purple squares from Clue 5 and some additional green squares to make Ohio Stars.

The directions were to cut four matching squares for the four corners, but since they weren’t necessarily going to match the green from Clue 2, I decided not to work with sets of four, but instead to make my Ohio Stars extra scrappy by using four different green squares for the corners.

The second part of the main block was to use the Tricky Triangles from Clues 3 and 4, as well as the Half Square Triangles from Clue 1 to wrap around the Ohio Star center.  These blocks got big in a hurry!

The sashing in between the blocks is made from the long gray units from Clue 6, and the 9-patches and purple rectangles from Clue 5.  This photo shows what that will look like around the blocks, but these are not part of every single block, this latest addition is the sashing that runs between all of the blocks.

The only remaining part of the pattern that I did was the completer border.  This quilt pattern has three borders, but leaving out the two outer borders left me with a quilt the size I desired. 

I had never heard of a completer border before, but what it does is help the last few secondary designs to be complete, rather than cut off.  I know I’m not explaining that well, so here’s a couple of photos.

See the black circle in the upper right?  Once all of the sashing is put together, it makes a secondary design of a Churn Dash block from the sashing and the orange triangles at the very edge of the blocks.  But down in the circle in the bottom left, with the blocks and sashing, the Churn Dash isn’t complete.

Enter the completer border.  It’s one last row, that finishes those Churn Dashes and completes the quilt.  All of the half square triangles were supposed to be orange/gray, but I felt like that would make the quilt too orange, way too orange.  So I made the ones that would complete the Churn Dashes orange/gray and the rest white/gray to mellow out the quilt a bit.

I like how both of the Quiltville Mystery Quilts that I have done have secondary block designs within the sashing.

Finished Quilt

So, knowing that I wrote up a whole tutorial on how to pick colors and fabrics for a quilt, am I happy with how this quilt turned out?

Absolutely!  

Since so much of the yardage is gray, it’s a very mellow quilt. 

I don’t think there’s enough blue in it, or maybe the blue simply doesn’t “pop” the way the aqua and coral do.  I planned to bind the quilt in a purple/gray print, but ultimately decided to use a scrappy blues binding and I think that ties all of the colors together well.