I’ve been involved with mystery quilts almost as long as I’ve been quilting. My first one was very interesting. It was actually a huge misunderstanding. I thought I was going to read a mystery novel and make a quilt that somehow coordinated with the novel! Oh my goodness. I also had no understanding of light/medium/dark in fabric, and based on the finished quilt, I had one light and all the rest were darks. So that translated to almost no contrast in the quilt at all.

Fast forward about 10 years and I started designing mystery quilts for a local guild. I never forgot that first experience I had, so I tried really hard to make sure there was enough information in the fabric selection instructions that students would get a quilt that they liked. I try to specify which fabrics really need to have a high contrast from other specific fabrics.

I also tried to give a selection of sizes to make for the mystery, I can see where it can be daunting to throw yourself into a queen sized quilt when you have absolutely no idea where you are going to end up. I did that last year with the Kaffe Fassett Mystery in 2018. I think I got really lucky – I picked the darker color way and I like the end result. I would not have been happy with the lighter color way, but that’s just how I’m wired. It’s a big quilt (82×82) for not knowing how it was going to turn out, but I like it.

I’ve been asked to design a new mystery this year, and I’m really enjoying the process again. Some things are constant – I like stars a lot and I still like to use them in a mystery. Some things have changed – I really really like scrappy quilts, the scrappier the better and that can be a challenge to use in a mystery quilt if people aren’t expecting that. The audience contains a lot of newer quilters who don’t have The Stash Of The Ages in their sewing room to pull from. So it can be a little scrappy but needs to support someone who is buying all the fabric for the quilt. I still like large quilts but I’m trying to keep this one smaller than a twin size so that it’s not overwhelming for a new quilter. A lot of folks would be shocked if the first clue were to sew 864 half square triangles….

Right now I’ve got three possible designs out there and I keep tweaking them a bit and coming back to the same one as my favorite. I really hope it gets picked for the project. Soon it will be time to break down the steps and write the instructions then it’s time for: Come, Watson! The game is afoot!