"Piece of Cake" 2024 Brown Bag Mystery Quilt Completed

It took me a long time to get around to quilting this top which I finished in June. It sat around all summer, waiting! Seems appropriate to have finished now because this quilt feels very autumnal.

The pattern is called “Piece of Cake”, Karen Montgomery’s 2024 Brown Bag Mystery Quilt. My Brown Bag came from O’Sewpersonal in O’Fallon, Missouri. I exchanged two fabrics in my bag for 2 alternates in the same fabric line, Kim Diehl’s “Quiet Grace” line printed by Henry Glass & Co., Inc.

The colors in the fabrics are outside of my comfort zone. I tend toward bright primary colors or pastels. So I didn’t love with this quilt while I was working on it. It was only today, when I hung the finished quilt on the clothes line that realized that it really is a beautiful quilt.

I mostly used straight line quilting but there are free-motion quilted daisy-like flowers in the rust colored blocks and tiny clusters of berries in the setting border blocks which echo the berries in the black fabric.

The quilt is turned on it’s side in the photo above so that it didn’t drag in the dusty ground. Here is a photo of the quilt rotated.

Image rotated to show the quilt as it’s intended to be shown.

And finally a couple of pictures of my assistant, who has taken an active part in the assembly of this quilt. Click to see him earlier in the process. Seems like he thinks he’s the subject of my photograph and then turns around and realizes that maybe he isn’t the star this time!

"Piece of Cake" 2024 Brown Bag Mystery Quilt Top

Assembled! Here is my version of Karen Montgomery’s 2024 Brown Bag Mystery Quilt she has named “Piece of Cake.” I wasn’t so sure about the colors while I was sewing it, but now I think this is one stunning quilt.

Back in February, when my bag of mystery fabrics arrived, I pulled out two reds which I didn’t particularly like. You can read more about that in my post from February 22, 2024. At the time I knew I’d swapped in fabrics of similar values to those I’d decided not to use, but I really had no idea what they would look in the finished quilt top. Whew. It worked out!

Like many of the other mystery quilt participants, I also decided to use a print fabric in the 4 patches flanking the center of the quilt. Karen has them as background fabric, with the intention that they could be used to do a fancy quilting design in that negative space. With all the dark fabrics in this quilt, I felt that having 4 cream patches wasn’t the best option for my quilt. I did lay it out with the background patches, but I felt it was just too white.

This quilt is assembled on the diagonal. The steps in Karen Montgomery’s mystery quilt are always very easy. But the assembly, despite all her excellent instructions, is always mind boggling. It’s the point where I’m so glad I didn’t decide to make more than one version because the piecing steps are so easy! But when I’m done, I’m so glad I made at least one!