Brown Bag Quilt Challenge

Finally this week I got started on this project! We are in CO. with DS Jonathan and his buddy Michael and Mike's wife Lauren. Wednesday the guys including my DH went to Telluride to ski while Lauren and I went to Huggy Bunch quilt day in Montrose. Lauren had a blast, she thought HB was the coolest thing ever, LOL, about 25 women sitting around sewing and chatting.

Lauren has been learning to sew/quilt since last summer and each time we meet to sew she learns a new quilty skill.

Needing to get the BBQ challenge under way I had decided to do Paper Piecing and thought it a good opportunity to show Lauren the basics of PP and curved seams.

We chose the Rattlesnake block from Karen Stone's book and each completed a couple of blocks at Huggy Bunch then continued to sew on Friday while the snow came down ..........

we enjoyed the coziness of the warm indoors.........

and the guys played cribbage downstairs!

Here are Lauren's blocks, she has chosen CW repros, her favorite fabrics.

Hasn't she done a great job? She is a fast learner and has really fallen for the art of quilting. I love how these have turned out with the CW repros.

Above is what came in the BB challenge and I can add as many as I want to pull from my stash to complement them.

I think that these look rather anemic compared to Lauren's, but here's what I made with three of the challenge fabrics and two fabrics from my stash.

The fourth challenge fabric is the one on the far right above, totally unrelated to any of the other three that came with it! I picked out four more fabrics from my stash that would all blend ok with it and I plan to make another grouping of PP blocks with some of these. This set of blocks won't "go" at all with what I have already made, but I have combined unrelated PP blocks before quite successfully, using another fabric to tie them together. Heaven only knows if I will be able to repeat this feat, and if not I will have two smaller quilts, which is not a successful challenge because we are meant to make one item from the challenge fabrics.

We are allowed to purchase one additional fabric so I will be on the hunt for something to tie all of this together-good luck you say?! I am not at all sure that I have enough time to find the perfect "blender", the project is due April 1st.