Orange Crush Mystery Step 1- Done!

This is the 150- 4 patches for step 1 of the Orange Crush Mystery Quilt on Bonnie's site. It is so fun. This is the first mystery quilt I have ever done. I fell in love with the idea of using orange fabric. It is not a color I use too often so I was surprised that I wanted to do this. But I am now anxiously awaiting Step 2. If anyone is interested I suggest you check it out. It's not too late.

I am leaving on Thursday for a quilting retreat with my quilt guild. I am chairman of the event and it has been some work to organize this. My co-chair has helped me every step of the way. I could not have done this by myself. Now that it is almost here, I'm looking forward to getting away. The funny thing is I didn't think I would find much to work on. I have several UFO's and BOM's but, when I go to retreat I like to sew on something that I don't have to concentrate real hard on. Some "no think" sewing and I haven't been doing much of that lately so I had to go digging in my UFO's to find a "no think" project.

I found a project I had started a while back. It is from Bonnie's website. The Basketweave Strings are foundation pieced and so easy.

I also found a small kit with a preprinted panel that just needs borders. It is a Benartex pattern called "Kaye's Kitchen Panel".

There is also a paper pieced tree block that I need to start working on but it is more thinking than I want to do. Paper piecing doesn't come easy to me. I bought this kit from my guild's Christmas auction a few years ago. I love the look of the scrappy trees. Maybe I will bring this one. Just in case I get all the other things finished and run out of things to do! HA! I think this should be enough to keep me quite busy this weekend. We will also be having a charm strip exchange in batiks. I don't have many batiks so I'm going to participate in this. It will be fun!