Celtic Solstice Mystery Quilt

This year I participating in a Mystery Quilt. A famous quilter named Bonnie Hunter offers up this mystery every year as a thank you to her blog readers. This year the quilt is called Celtic Solstice after her recent trip to Ireland. The colors for this quilt are blue, orange, green, yellow and a neutral.

Let me just take a minute to talk about what a quilt costs to make. This quilt requires 4.5 yards of blue fabric, 4.25 of orange, 4 of green, 3 of yellow and 4 of neutral. All this adds up to  19.75 yards of fabric. I chose to use lots of different fabrics within a color range which is makes for a scrappy quilt. Good quality cotton fabric costs about $12.00 a yard so for 19.75 yards = $237.00. This is just for the top of the quilt I will still need to purchase fabric for the back of the quilt as well as the batting. When all is said and done I will have spent close to $400.00. What I want to add is that this is a king size quilt and it will take me approximately 10 weeks to complete start to finish so that is $40.00 per week of entertainment for me and at the end I will have a quilt that I made and will sleep under. Seems totally worth it to me.( Keep in mind that $400 does not include my labor.)

Here is my basket of fabric!

Friday I recieved the first clue for the mystery. I needed to cut 140 orange triangles, 240 neutral triangles, and 380 pairs of blue side triangles.

First I cut a 3.5" strip of fabric then I cut the triangle shapes using a special ruler.

  2 hours later I have all my orange triangles cut. Whew! ( I will cut the neutrals another time.)

 Next I needed to cut all the blue side triangles. This took another 2 hours to cut 380 PAIRS. That's alot! This is what just the orange and blue look like.

Now I can begin sewing these together.

One down 139 more orange triangles to go (plus the 240 neutrals)!

Here is a sampling of a few I got done.