Testing, Testing!

Finishing my first block for the L&T QAL

I felt pretty excited about my Lavender & Twine plan, but as I stitched and stitched and stitched, I started to wonder if my scrappy, 3D version of that flat, solid image would feel the same, or even better like I hoped. I’m guessing that happens to you too? You colour in or have an image in your head, and then half way through, you’re not sure if you steered it in the right direction?

This is my Lavender & Twine colouring sheet, coloured in the Procreate App (tutorial here!).

I realised after I coloured this in that I don’t have much of that gold for the stems, so I went either side of it - darker and lighter. I cut a mix of scrappy navy, leaning towards black for the squares, and though the diamonds are all jewel tones in a kind of limited palette, I just cut anything that took my fancy from scraps, veering away from too much yellow or navy or dark teal.

I’m still mid-way through sewing the centres of my blocks together, but I was starting to get nervy. I didn’t want to baste all those half houses and squares and then decide that what it really needed was solids to calm the whole thing down!

And so it was time for a test block.

Usually I baste and stitch everything in bulk stages, and if you’ve been following along for this quilt, you would have seen the progress - all the diamonds basted and stitched, all the centres basted and stitched. The next job was all the edge pieces - houses, half houses, squares and triangles basted and stitched. That’s how I’ve made my last 2 versions. It feels much more flowy, more lose-myself-in-the-process to me than making one block at a time. But I took a break from my usual flow and basted enough shapes to finish one block, just to see if I liked where I was going.

For my Lavender & Twine QAL stitchers: It’s probably good to take a break here to make a note about directional shapes. If you’re stitching along with me, and are coming up to this part, you’ll need to take note of which way your half houses are cut and basted. (Instructions in the pattern.)

If you’re using solids, the direction of the cut doesn’t matter, but you need to take note while basting. (I basted mine in pairs - one facing left and one facing right, so that I had an equal number of both)

If you’re cutting from a print, you need to make sure you cut the right amount of shapes facing each way. If you’re using a single print for the whole lot, this is easy - just keep your width of fabric strip folded in half and cut 2 shapes at a time. They will automatically mirror each other.

For this quilt, I wanted to use low volume scraps. I cut a bunch of strips first from scraps and stash, and then cut the half houses in both directions, putting them in left and right piles as I went. When I cut 10, I put them in a pile off to the side to make it easy to keep count.

If you look at the edge shapes below, you’ll see that while basting, I left the outside edges open! These are the sides that will be machine sewn into the quilt. It’s easy to keep track of which edges face the outside - every long edge of the half houses and every long edge of the triangles.

And then I made my little edge units and sewed them around this block! What do you think?

I actually had to pin it up and think about it. I usually shy away from really dark colours in my quilts, so it’s taken a little while to get used to, but I’ve decided I like it!

There’s nothing quite as demotivating as being unsure if you’ll like your work after putting in all that effort. I’m glad I took a little break from my process to make this test block. It makes me feel excited to keep going!

After finishing my test, it gave me an idea for these fun little X blocks I found during my (ongoing) studio tidy-up. Black backgrounds! I had thought that being relieved and excited about my test block might push me to keep stitching more Lavender & Twine, but no. Sometimes our motivation is a sneaky thing, and it lands somewhere unexpected. I’m learning to run with it rather than push against it.

Is anything holding you back from making progress this week? If so, I encourage you to tune in an listen to what your reluctance is telling you. Maybe you’re not sure if you’ll like it and you need to do a test block and stand back. Maybe you’re bored and need to work on something else for a while. Maybe you’re overwhelmed by the mess in your sewing space and need to do a tidy up before you can keep going (speaking to myself here!).

Whatever the reason, I hope you find joy in the answer.

Jodi. xx

PS. This is part of a monthly series walking you through a Lavender & Twine Quilt. You can find the others sprinkled through my posts here: