Brighton Modern Quilters - Paper Bag Challenge

I've been a member of the Brighton Modern Quilters group since it almost began. It's been fun meeting up with local quilters to talk about techniques, share ideas, and be surrounded by beautiful fabrics and quilts!

If you're local to the area (or semi-local, like me), be sure to check out one of our meetings! We meet at Monarch Quilts on the 4th Monday of the month. Our next meeting is August 23 at 7:00pm.

A handful of our members even have blogs...Rossie, Sarah, Debbie, Lynn, Angie, Bonnie, Lynn, and our fearless leader, Andrea!

At our latest meeting, we shared the results of our paper bag challenge. Back in May we each brough a paper bag filled with a fat quarter, some fabric scraps and some random notions. We swapped bags and then had a few months to turn our bag into a quilt or project of some sort. It seems everyone in the group put off this project until the last minute (myself included - I was up at six the morning of to finish sewing and stuffing my project).

Here's what I started with:

A great big pile of dark batiks! Batiks are so not my thing, but I was able to salvage one strip of green batik fabric to use in the challenge (we had to use at least one piece, so I stuck with the bare minimum :)


I combined my green strip of fabric along with some other greens and blues from my stash. (I should say right now that I was hoping to make a mini quilt for the Doll Quilt Swap and turn this project into a twofer).

I wanted to make a patchwork cutout strip (like in this project seen in my flickr favorites), so I cut the fabrics into strips and sewed them together.


I cut out some junk mail to make my template in the general shape I wanted to use.


Then I laid everything out on my base fabric and added the brown for extra contrast.


I pieced the brown to the fabric strip and then appliqued the other side of the brown down to the background fabric. At this point I went back to read my Doll Quilt Swap partner's preferences (just in case) and realized that I missed the fact that she hates brown. Oops!


So, instead of turning this into a quilt, I turned it into a decorative pillow for our living room. And now I have officially made a new throw pillow to replace the other pillows on the couch. This one is fluffier than the old pillows and much more suitable for Sunday afternoon naps!