Every winter, Karen Montgomery offers a Brown Bag Mystery Quilt. This year the title is “Piece of Cake.” The participating shops know what the finished quilt looks like and they pick the fabrics for the bag. They might just show paint chips of the colors or one possible fabric for the bag. But this project is essentially an unknown to the quilters participating.

I looked at a couple shops and the one fabric I saw that appealed to me is out of my comfort zone. But I really liked it. It was “Cranberry” from Kim Diehl’s “Quiet Grace” line printed by Henry Glass & Co., Inc.

“Cranberrry”, photo from the Henry Glass & Co. Inc website.

I didn’t know Karen Deihl’s fabrics so I did a quick search to have a look. To my eye it looks a bit retro/prairie. But I loved the rich red in this fabric so decided to take a chance on this bag.

Here’s what I got.

Fabrics picked by the shop for my Brown Bag.

Wow. These are really dark fabrics…and no sign of the “Cranberry” design I liked. Oops. Now what? The background cream is great and I like the red berries on black and the tiny floral on green. I really don’t like either of the red fabrics…especially the red and cream one.

So I went back online to look for other Karen Diehl fabrics I could possibly substitute. Mind you, I have no idea what this quilt pattern looks like! I only have yardage amounts and I heard that a lot of the pieces are small so large prints aren’t a good choice unless you just want the colors and don’t mind the designs disappearing.

The photo at the top shows the fabrics I am going to use. I took photos of them and put them in grey scale with the 2 fabrics I am jettisoning.

In the left hand photo, the cream and red origin fabric is paired with the yellow green floral fabric. They have virtually the same color density, so I’m fairly confident that is a good swap. In the right hand photo is the dark red fabric paired with the brown and cream floral. The background of the brown floral is almost as dark as the red fabric, but the flowers are much brighter than the paisley pattern in the original. So this choice is a risk. But I really like my modified selection of prints, so I’m going to see what happens!

And so begins yet another adventure.

Speaking of adventures, I just adopted an 8 week old puppy last week. With every 2 hour potty breaks, and not as many naps as my last puppy, I’m not getting much done. So don’t be surprised if you don’t get an email announcing a new blog post every Thursday. But I’ll try my best to keep the posts coming!