Old Town Quilt – The 2024 Quiltville Mystery Quilt

The Old Town Quilt is the 2024/2025 Quiltville Mystery and it’s a good one! 

Every winter Bonnie Hunter from Quiltville releases a completely free quilt pattern, and she makes it a mystery by releasing just one part of the pattern each week. 

This year the quilt pattern is called Old Town Quilt Pattern, and is based on Bonnie’s trip to Poland last year.  I’m sure you are looking at my purple, orange and green quilt and wondering how it connects to Poland. 

It doesn’t. 

Not at all.

I changed the color palette from the pattern.  Bonnie’s directions call for Red, Coral and Aqua.  I don’t love red, so I decided to use purple instead, and then the greens and salmon oranges came after.

A few years ago I went radically different from Bonnie’s color suggestions, and I wrote up a tutorial about color value and even if you aren’t planning to make this quilt, you should go check that out to give you ideas for how to change other quilts/patterns/tutorials to suite the color scheme you are looking for or the fabrics already in your stash.

Speaking of making this quilt… the clues are only free for a short time!  Go check out Bonnie’s website before she takes the clues down and turns Old Town Quilt into a for-sale pattern.

Old Town Mystery Quilt

I will not give away any quilt sizes, unit measurements or numbers needed for each clue.  This is not my pattern and that’s not my place.  Bonnie would be thrilled if you went to get that info from her.

Clue One

This year the clues for the mystery quilt started before Thanksgiving which was fun.  It was as if the holidays came a whole week early!

Clue one was flying geese units. 

Not everyone loves flying geese, but I sure do!  I like the 4-at-a-time method because it’s so fast!  Bonnie has a special ruler that makes it so you can cut flying geese from skinny strips of fabric, and I would like to learn that method as well.

I have a Flying Geese Tutorial for the 4-at-a-time way, and it includes information on making them in a variety of different sizes.

I will say, making the flying geese my way led to lots of bulky seams when putting the quilt together, so this is a good quilt to use Bonnie’s way of making geese.

Clue Two

Clue two was itty, bitty 4-patches.  I do love postage stamp sized quilt blocks, but since I wasn’t working with scraps this year, I saved this clue until the very end so that I wasn’t cutting down larger pieces of fabric that I would want later to make little units, knowing that I would generate some scraps along the way.

I made some of the blocks purple and neutral according to the directions, but the ones that will go in the border I mixed in some green too, mostly so that I wouldn’t need to buy any additional purple fabric.

Clue Three

Clue three was quarter square triangles.  I have a tutorial for jumbo quarter square triangles that I made from a Layer Cake, and now that I’m thinking about it, I would like to make another quilt with that tutorial this year.

I had several fabrics of each color, so I made sure each of my quarter square triangles used two different purples.

Clue Four

Half Square Triangles.  I do so love HSTs, here is a link to the most recent quilt I made from them.  It’s bright and cheery and the photos are from a warm summer day which is a nice memory on this cold, rainy, winter night.

Clue Five

Clue five was square in a square units, and I thought all along that these would be block centers.  Bonnie provided directions for many different ways of making these units, I chose to use paper piecing to make sure the points were accurate. 

I like the look of quilts made from economy blocks (square in a square in a square) and I think 2025 is the year so that I can get some practice at these blocks away from paper piecing.

Clue Six

More half square triangles!  Same quilt block, different colors. 

Clue Seven

Teeny, tiny flying geese!  I’ve never made flying geese this small before, but really, no harder than the larger size from clue one.

Clue seven had a second part, attaching the flying geese to the quarter square triangles from clue three.

I know, I know.  It looks super wonky.  I was having trouble getting a photo without the shadow of my hand and phone, so the photo is taking a little off center which makes the whole block look off kilter.

It’s really not.

Clue Eight

More flying geese!  That’s three separate clues this year with flying geese in a variety of sizes.

It’s a good thing I like them!

Unfortunately, I don’t love trimming the dog ears from flying geese or half square triangles, and the to-be-trimmed pile has gotten out of control!

I was pretty sure at this point that the next clue would be the quilt reveal.

Clue Nine

And I was right!  Clue nine included information for putting the blocks together  and I just love this photo.  It’s so bright and fun!

After putting the blocks together, there was sashing and borders and at this point I went off script from Bonnie’s pattern to work with the fabric I had and not need to shop for additional.

Rather than a large, queen size quilt, I made only 9 blocks and the associated sashing for a small lap quilt.

While I did follow the directions to make the units is sets, I decided that sewing the quilt together with my sets all mixed across different blocks would be okay since I was working with solids instead of patterned fabric.

I made my sashing from a mix of green and purple.

It’s so cool how different the sides of the quilt look that have the different colors in the sashing.

I have not yet sewn my borders onto the quilt center, but they are a checkerboard of purples and greens and it will be interesting to see how the

Borders affect the overall look of the quilt.

Normally I baste, quilt and bind my quilts before sharing them.

But this time I wanted to get this out to you in a hurry, because the clues to the Old Town Quilt are only free for a short time.  After a few weeks, Bonnie takes the clues down and re-releases the quilt as a pattern that you have to pay for.