A note about Bonnie's color selections and fabrics and other general info:
@joe'smom Thanks for the ruler review. Bonnie will give tool suggestions and pictures but also directions for those of us without the tools. I use mostly standard rulers but sometimes I will give myself taped lines for consistency or other reasons. Some people swear by some of rulers they have gotten for these projects. Sometimes I just swear at mine
I am one of those she warns about needing more yardage. I cut large, press my seams open, and then trim down for proper sizing. Is the way I work and I'm happy. Every year though I think... maybe this is the year I should follow Bonnie's advice on how to press the seams to one side. I will say, she has very good reasons for doing things one way or the other.
When you look at the Paint Chips and Bonnie's samples of fabrics you will notice that she uses a very large color range. Is more of a concept than a color.
It is important with her projects that you can easily tell one color group from another, but we can usually switch entire color groups so long as you end up with (for this project) 3 distinct colors plus a background. Some of her projects can be done in values, so Dark, Medium, Light, and the Neutral for this one.
Bonnie's pieces can end up what I call small -- 1" finished size is not unusual, anything much over more than 2-3" square is unusual! Large scale fabrics can give weird results, so if you have a mostly pink fabric with varying blue bubbles, chance is that if you want the fabric to read pink, you are going to get an entirely blue bubble! Which can be fine -- or not.
Sometimes she has us make sets of pieces that will go together in blocks. Pre-Bonnie I didn't have much need or use for the little fabric clips. Now I have hundreds! I consider myself a pretty good organized quilter, but my skills always get tested and improved. Even though I can leave everything out in my sewing space I try to clean up as I go between clues. Is good to do anyway, and the weekly chapters of the mystery gives me a set chance to improve my skills on clean up...