New year's Eve Mystery Quilt

QT Mystery Quilts is hosting a NYE project- the past two years I have joined a NYE Mystery and this year will be quilting along with three local quilter friends. We will be working together on the mystery quilt all NYE day and I am using only stash fabrics as in the past two years.
There is quite a collection of African theme fabrics untouched to date in the stash so I pulled them out to try and find a nice arrangement of two mediums, a dark, a light, a focus and a border fabric.

This was the first idea - left to right, far left is the light, the next two are the mediums, the orange is the focus and the last on the right is the dark.

The mediums give me some concern for two reasons.
1-The large gold print will get lost when cut up into small pieces
2-The two golds are fairly close in value and may not have enough contrast

Here is a brown to replace the large-print gold that will then work perfectly for the border.
This looks like the better alternative, the brown print is rather geometric but it will do, it doesn't matter to me if it goes in different directions, makes the design more interesting. Tell me what you think if you have an opinion-most of us quilters do, LOL!

It's good to be able to use some of this ethnic collection and I am determined not to buy for the project, I want to use stash in order to rotate older fabrics out of stash to make room for new ones! Taking into consideration fabric purchases for this year-around 100 yards-the stash so far has decreased by about 50 yards, but my goal is more ambitious for the coming year. The"fabric out" total could conceivably increase by 40 yards or so if the four projects in progress were all done by year's end! Not likely that will happen but I might get one or two done. Stay tuned!


Christmas Day I made cinnamon buns- did the prep. Christmas Eve so they only had to be baked on Christmas Day. Sons #1 and #4 and their families met up with DH and me at the home of son #2 to eat, visit and open gifts. Youngest DGS is missing from the group pic, he was napping, but here is the little cutie with his "Docband "helmet, he has to wear it 23 hours/day for about seven months. You can see his Mum and Dad have decorated it with their favorite team colors, go Cowboys! Baby Matthew is 8 months old.

Below is a pic of his Daddy at about the same age, wearing one of DH's flight helmets, think these two are related?!


Then our "boys" went off to visit the other side of their families and DH and I came home for a quiet evening.
The Shakespeare quilt was calling to me and a spot of mindless sewing, more scrappy pot holders put together from border blocks left over from the strip scrap quilt.

The backs are larger scrap pieces enlivened by the selvedge bindings.

This week these two numbers were drawn from the VTT comments.

JoJo's and Keetha's vintage aprons and scrappy pot holders will be in the mail to them probably Monday.
There will be one more drawing next week after VTT.