The NTAQ challenge for November was a piece by Ellen Carey

The piece was "Pulls with Mixed & Off-Set Pods," 2010.  Ellen recently exhibited at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth.  Her work is photographed with a large-scale polaroid camera.  You can read about her process here.  It's pretty cool.

The first thing I do when presented with new challenge artwork is to pin it on the design wall and simply stare at it for a while.  Squinting a little helps, too.  I look at it for a bit, turn away for a bit, and then look at it again.  Something always starts to grab my attention.  In this piece it was the four distinct color zones and the strong, dark lines.  Aha!  I had found something I could work with!

I silkscreened three pieces of fabric, one predominantly green, one red/orange and another that was yellow/orange/red.  These three silkscreens were the "bones" of my piece:

I added some other fabrics,  many from the latest SAQA fabric collection:

 And I used some commercial prints and batiks as well as my silkscreened fabrics:

 I really loved the orange blob fabric.  It was part of the SAQA collection:

When putting the four parts together, I pieced some "bridge" sections, which I think of as sections that help one part flow into the next.  So in the end, the four sections blend together and are hard to see unless you look for them.  Here is the final piece -- orange/yellow in the top left, green in the top right, blue in the bottom left and red/orange in the bottom right.  Kind of a mushy four-plex.

I haven't named this piece yet.  And it is in the large pile to be quilted.  I'll post a picture of the quilt when finished, hopefully later this week.  And I'd love to hear some name suggestions!
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Boomer update:  He has pancreatitis and is responding well to treatment.  Hopefully he'll be home this afternoon, Friday at the latest!