Cotton Cuts Mystery Puzzle BOM; the conclusion

Well, the final month has arrived, and I am almost done with my 10-month Mystery Puzzle Quilt journey! Feel free to hop back in time to my first post about this...

I've really enjoyed the process of doing this Block of the Month thing. Each month, around the 5th or so, I received a cute pink package in the mail containing pre-cut fabric pieces and instructions to assemble a few blocks. I had chosen my color way (i.e. picked one that included lime green, duh) in February for the Cotton Cuts Spring Mystery Puzzle Quilt without knowing what the finished product would look like. I guess that's the "mystery" part.

That scared me a bit! I'm pretty particular about my quilting style. I tend to lean towards more modern designs... and for $17.50 a month for the small quilt, this was kind of a risk for me. If you think about it, that's $175 over the course of the 10 months. Yikes! I've never spent that much on a  quilt top in my life! Well... I suppose now I have.

Aside from the cost and the big scary mystery part, I've landed on a few pros and cons about this sort of mail-order BOM thing.

PROS:

• All the pieces come right to you monthly, already cut out and ready to sew together
• Simple instructions
• Cute little random gifts in the packages (project ideas, fun magnets, sewing nerd pencils...)
• Helpful Facebook group for updates and seeing others' projects
• Great customer service
• Quick-sew for those who may not have much time to quilt

CONS:

• I really, really like to design my own quilt patterns. I also LOVE cutting the fabric. But that doesn't apply here, since I knew what I was getting into. Ha ha! 
• It was hard to wait a month between kits! Some of my blocks were sewn on different machines with different settings, so they don't all quite fit together perfectly. No big deal really... I just usually sew my quilt tops together within a pretty short time frame. 
• Sometimes the pieces were cut a little funky. I believe they use a die cutter to do this, and I got a couple little HSTs that were off-grain enough to make my blocks kind of wonky. I also saw a few people saying they were missing pieces (not me personally), but the Cotton Cuts ladies were kind and quick to ship out anything that was needed.
• The instructions were printed in black and white, which made it a little bit difficult to tell which color/print went where. Understandable though, since it would have been a logistical nightmare to make a dozen different sets of instructions in color. :) Fortunately the first kit included a color ID chart, which remained at the top of my storage box for easy access. 
• I think the instructions could also be emailed. While I appreciate receiving everything together as one little kit, I'd happily download my instructions and save the ink and paper. This would also make it easier and more cost-effective to see them in color!  
• It was so quick-sew it left me wanting more! Maybe not a con... but sometimes it left me feeling like "that's it??". 
• I'm a bit bummed that I didn't think to get backing fabric right away. All these prints are from the Moda Hey Dot collection, which is now discontinued. I might be able to scrounge something up from somewhere, but it could be a challenge! I also wish some of the other prints in this collection were used in place of the ones with very similarly-sized dots. A bit of scale variation would be a nice touch. :)

The "Hey Dot" collection by Moda

And now for the fun part! Assembling the quilt...

I was silly when making these, and decided not to label my blocks after completing them. It's a puzzle, right? I ended up going back through all my sets of instructions and matching the blocks back up to the months (using the color chart and reading carefully). I should have taken a picture here, but I didn't. Oops.

All the instructions.

Handy color chart.

Then I laid the blocks out on the floor according to the assembly chart, pinned them together and sewed them into columns. My craft room is getting pretty full again (I still have that huge box of donated mattress foam leftover from my Repurpose for a Reason project!), so it was a tad cramped- especially with my goofy dog lounging around on the rug. And eventually on my quilt top...

This one is for me, right mom?

Here's the finished top with the borders on (another thing I rarely do!).

Apparently I hung it upside-down...

Cotton Cuts included the fabric for the binding in this last kit, but I need to figure out what to do for a backing. I was thinking about a solid orange, fuchsia or red to make the weird-colored dots in this one print seem more intentional. I'm not a huge fan of this print with this particular selection of fabrics, but maybe the contrast of a bright backing would be appealing to me. I'll have to do some looking around.

Here are a couple of the other quilters' projects in some of the other colorways!