Brown Fabric Challenge

At the beginning of the year, my friend Kerry launched a challenge to show the color brown a little love.  She asked us to make anything we wanted with a piece of brown fabric that she would send us.  I was immediately in.  The deadline was the end of October, so, nine months after I received her package, here is my finished brown challenge project:

I made a brown table runner based on Retro Crochet quilt pattern (I purchased the pattern but reduced the scale to fit my project).  The brown color that Kerry sent me was labeled Kona Sable and the binding is an unlabeled brown solid from my stash.  The rest is a true scrappy masterpiece: the yellow and white fabrics are from my Rest of the Quilt Back test blocks, the green is from my Christmas Memories quilt, and the brown print is leftover binding from my Halloween Pebbled Prairie quilt.

The back gets into the scrappy fun too - a pattern called "Retro Crochet" is pretty much begging for me to use the leftover crochet doilies fabric from the back of my Just My Type quilt!  I quilted this one myself, with a tiny orange peel in the yellow center of each block, a white loop pattern in the white petals of the flowers, and a brown meander in the rest.  This is the perfect amount of custom quilting and in a piece this small it went very quickly.

This piece was made with a purpose.  My sewing room has a wood ledge running along one wall and the wood in this spot was damaged from some spiderwebs that were behind the photo frames that I previously had here.  Now the damage is covered up and if the spiders try again the wood is protected.

Although it took me almost the entire challenge period to make this tablerunner, this was not the first time that I cut into the fabric that Kerry sent me.  When I made my Solids Challenge Quilt at the beginning of the year, both browns in this tablerunner were pressed into service.  No solids were safe from contributing to that quilt!

This is not the first of Kerry's challenges that I've completed, and hopefully it won't be my last.  I can't wait to see what she comes up with next.  Thanks for stopping by!