More on Roll Roll Cotton Boll

There hasn't been a lot of machine sewing going on here, but I've made a little progress on the Roll Roll Cotton Boll mystery posted over at Quiltville.  I've done a little hand sewing on my Christmas Hearts tablecloth redwork blocks, and I've stitched a few hexagons.  I have my Hearts and Flowers applique' quilt by Kim McLean out to try and finish the center on that so I can move on to the borders. 

This is step 1 of the mystery.  For the first step we either looked through our scraps or cut from our stash to make 172 of these units. 

The next Friday we made 120 pink and brown half square triangle units.

Then comes my favorite step.  We were to dig into our scraps and pull out anything that was neutral or mostly neutral.  I had some real "dogs" that I couldn't figure out what to do with, and they went into these 60 string blocks. 

Here are some of the finished string blocks.  These blocks really sew up quickly if you just spend 10 or 15 minutes a day at the machine.  You will find a link to my String Block Tutorial underneath my header. 

Week 4 was relatively quick and easy compared to all of those string blocks, so I skipped ahead and completed that one while still sewing the strings.

OK. I was caught up by the time that clue 5 was to be released.  And, then came step 5....600 red/neutral half square triangles.  So far I have 18 of the 600 finished,  so it will be awhile before those are all done. 

Step 6 uses these red/neutral half square triangles and the units from step 1 with brown triangles so there are no photos because I was busy with the holidays.  Then things slowed down, and step 7 was posted, and the center of the quilt was revealed. 

This is part of block 1 of the quilt center.  Maybe you could guess that those red/neutral half square triangles go around the outside of it.  So this is just a partial block, but I like the colors and couldn't wait to sew just one. 

Then we did some more cutting of the string blocks, rearranged the pieces and sewed them back together to make this block. 

The next clue will be posted in the morning, and I plan to keep at this project until I get the top finished so that it doesn't become another UFO. 

Speaking of UFOs, I took a photo of part of my UFOs but couldn't get up the courage to post a photo yet.  I need to dig through  sort and organize them first in hopes that it really might not be as bad as it looks. 

We had warm blueberry muffins tonight to help pep up our leftovers.  We had a light dusting of snow this afternoon, and it seemed like the kind of weather to do a bit of baking. 

Hope you are all finding some time to do a little stitching today!!!!