Mystery Quilt: Brown Bag Mystery 2023

I wasn’t going to do this mystery quilt. I made 2 versions of “To the Point”, Karen Montgomery’s 2022 Brown Bag Mystery Quilt (BBM) which are beautiful. But the quilt pattern was larger than I wanted to tackle this year. But she has 2 options this year—one lap size and one queen size, so that made it doable.

In this mystery quilt you don’t get to chose the fabric or the pattern. The only option is picking a colorway, or perhaps seeing a focus fabric from the set. Initially there weren’t any fabric collections that interested me. But O’Sewpersonal Fabric Shop in O’Fallon, Missouri, showed the fabric on the left in the photo above in their second set of Brown Bag fabric options. The very saturated colors with the sunflowers, hydrangeas, daisies and forget-me-nots grabbed my attention. I really liked the fabric and wondered how that large print was going to work in a quilt. So, I signed on for 2023’s adventure.

When the fabrics arrived, things began to fall into place. The four fabrics on the right are the fabrics in the pieced blocks. The large print is for the borders. Based on the ruler recommended and the fact that all the fabrics that will be pieced have tossed designs (no matter which direction you turn the fabric the design looks fine and the flowers are small), I expect this quilt will feature some half square triangles and other similar blocks.

Clue number 1 comes on March 18th, with subsequent clues every other week. Because this is a mystery quilt, I will wait until it’s completed before I share it here on the blog. But there is a practice block, to be made with other fabrics of my choice, which may appear sooner…if I decide to make it!

Can’t wait to see what transpires this year. If you want to play along, you need to find a participating quilt shop to purchase fabric. That grants you access to the pattern which is mailed every other week, and private Facebook group where Karen Montgomery give excellent videos of how to sew each step. If there is a list of all the shops, I haven’t seen it. But a search for 2023 Brown Bag Mystery will give you a collection of posts from participating shops.

Click to see my 2022 BBM quilts. The floral quilt was made with the BBM quilt fabric I purchased and the dog quilt fabric came from my stash.

"To the Point" Pink/Lavender/Green Brown Bag Mystery Quilt Completed

My official “To the Point” Brown Bag Mystery Quilt is finally complete! This is quilt was made with fabrics chosen by the staff at O’Sewpersonal Sewing Center in O’Fallon, Missouri. The pattern was created by Karen Montgomery. I knew what the color way would be for the quilt, but didn’t know what fabric I’d receive nor what the mystery pattern would look like! It really takes a leap of faith to invest in the supplies when you have no idea what you’re really making!

Fortunately fabric choices I got are great and the pattern is a stunning constellation of stars which even extend out into the first border around the quilt.

I did the quilting on the other “To The Point” quilt I made using dog themed fabric from my stash. But there is so much white fabric between the stars in this version that I decided to have it quilted professionally. The beautiful pantogram longarm quilting was done at the shop, All About Quilts, in Walpole, MA. I chose the pantogram pattern. They picked a very pale pink thread for the quilting on the top of the quilt and a seafoam green to match the backing fabric, both perfect choices!

Here are the stars I used for the cornerstones in the quilt’s outer border. I made this star with the same quilting ruler used to make the stars in the quilt. (See my post on March 17, 2022 for information about the rulers). You can see the striped binding and the backing in this photo as well.

The piecing of this mystery quilt was really easy the the steps were all completed quickly. It was the assembly of the final blocks that was the real challenge. It required total concentration and lots of checking back at the instructions. But well worth it for the final outcome!