How Now Brown ... Snail

I've been making the snail's trail blocks for my lotto block samplers and thinking about the color brown.

These are the four blocks I made for the scrap-happy graduated sampler.


I used warmer shades of brown because I plan to place these four blocks in the upper right corner of the layout.

Once the blocks were surrounded with some red and orange rectangles cut from my scraps to give me an idea of how it might look, they seem to warm up a little bit more.

I've seen a few comments from quilters who don't care for brown or don't have much in their stash. In my scrap quilts, brown often masquerades as yellow, orange or red when I need a "dark" in those colors to make a scrappy block pattern work.  If you look at my scrappy Broken Dishes quilt (still unquilted), you might not see brown ... but it is there–in those red, orange and yellow blocks. 

For the Old MacDonald's Mystery Sampler, the color cue for the Snail's Trail blocks is "ground cover."

I decided to aim for palette that suggests a southwest landscape–restricted by what I can find in my stash–and made these sandy-sager colored blocks.

These blocks will be spread across the bottom of the quilt.

Information about both samplers can be found on the Block Lotto site on this page:

2016 Quilt-Along

I am joining the linky party for the Rainbow Scraps Challenge Scrap Happy Saturday.