The art quilting group I belong to held a “brown bag challenge.” No, we didn’t make quilts out of brown bags! We were each given a plain brown paper lunch bag and asked to put three items into it, with which a small 12″x12″ art quilt could be made. We exchanged bags anonymously and had two months to create something artful for the contributor.

The bag I selected contained three pieces of fabric – saturated  hand-dyes in cherry red and marine blue, and some Kaffe Fasset Shanty Town in the same colorway — and some green perle cotton floss.

The contents of my challenge bag

Shanty Town Purple by Brandon Mably for Kaffe Fassett Collection Westminster

I needed to sleep on it.

I decided to do a modified “stack and whack” with that house print. Stack-and-whack usually involves cutting 8 identical triangle blocks and rotating them to form an 8-sided kaleidoscope effect.  I only had 4 repeats of the pattern available, so I cut tiny 1.5″ squares, rotated them and joined them to form 2″ finished sized blocks.

I added some of the red, because it had nice directional streaking,  and a bit of complementary Kaffe fabric from my stash. I arranged the tiny blocks in a corner-to-corner color wave from blue to purple to red, with fun pops of green from the prints.

The assembled top, 13″x 13″

But I wasn’t finished. The agreement was to use a recognizable amount of each of the contributed items. I still had green embroidery cotton to feature somehow.

I needed to sleep on it again.

So many angles in that Shanty Town print. So many squares in my piecing.  The quilt needed something soft, curvy, organic.  And I could introduce that with embroidery.

I chain-, blanket- and feather-stitched an insect-like web right over that angular grid of whacked houses. I kind of love the results.