A Mussel Mystery

Haha, I thought there was a deadline for this mystery quilt that my quilt guild arranged. So I crammed and crammed to get this thing done by last Wednesday, and it turns out there's no deadline. But it's finished, and that's great!

Just like the mantra we had at the guild that evening: Better finished than perfect!

Here's the familiar front:

And the simple back:

Below are a bunch of pictures showing the quilting. After trying to figure out how to quilt a quilt that's so puffy in places from those unsquared blocks, I decided minimal quilting targeted to safe, non-puffy areas was the way to go. Because there was nothing to lose on this quilt, I also decided to play around with new quilting motives. I hate practicing free-motion and wasting good fabric on those pieces, so I use quilts that are already less than perfect (*grins*) and make them into guinea pigs.

I tried feathers in the center, but got tired of those.


Then I tried blossomy-loops in the white hour glass shapes, those were okay.


What ended up giving this quilt its name, Mussel Mystery, was the mussel-shell like McTavishing I started and kept going with in all the white triangles and some of the multi-coloured ones.


In the end, and despite my expectations, I like this quilt - it's quirky! But I'm staying away from triangles for a while...