welcome to wensleydale

i made a test block. yes, i already have sooo many projects in various stages of making. but this quilt has been haunting me and i just wanted to try it out. one block, that's all.

it's all the fault of this book which has been sitting at the bottom of my stairs for several weeks. i walk past it many times a day and see the wensleydale quilt on the cover every time i go by. i'm a little obsessed. 

i resisted buying "quilt recipes" by jen kingwell for a few years now. i already have so many quilt books, i knew many of the patterns in this one were template quilts, her patterns are amazing but usually sparsely written, i wasn't likely to use the baking recipes that make up half the book, and it has been priced at over 50 USD since it was published.

but . . .

i've had my eye on the wensleydale and daylesford quilts, both in this book. so when i found the price dropped on amazon, i ordered the book finally. just perusing jen's  quilts is always inspirational. i'm not sorry i got it. the "winki stars" and "diamond exchange" quilts also appeal to me greatly, but my goodness, they are complicated quilts! one of the things that makes jen's quilts unique is that she does templates and handsewing for many of her quilts. this produces shapes and looks you don't get with machine piecing. but template cutting and all the handsewing of them is outside my comfort zone and developed skill set.

i saw foundation paper piecing templates available for wensleydale and figured that would make things a snap to sew together. they've been sitting in my sewing room for a while.

this morning i passed that darn book cover again and just couldn't take it any more. shouldn't be too hard to put together one block, right? so i went in the sewing room and hunted out the papers. i looked at the pattern in the book, which is only instructions for using templates. i thought i had done paper piecing before but i quikly realized i had absolutely no idea what i was doing. 

i googled "how to do wenselydale foundation paper piecing" and had a few videos come up. i thought certianly someone somewhere had done a video of themselves using these papers to make this quilt block. 

• i found a helpful video for how to cut fabrics for the project from "the quilted chicken" on youtube. it did help with that, but didn't show how to put the block together.
• i was able to access two videos from "klquilts" on tiktok (an app i don't use or have), but i could only find part 1 & part 4 of the videos, which left a gaping hole in my knowledge of the process.
• those were the only wensleydale-specific videos i found, but i did watch this fpp video from "a quilting life"" that rounded out my ideas for how to proceed.

this, of course, took a lot longer than i intended just to get ready to start. then i pulled so many fabrics. i love the look of the couple of blocks showing on the book cover. here are the elements i noticed that appeal to me:

• high contrast between between each layer of the block making them distinctive from each other
• lots of dark and moody fabrics mixed with the bold and punchy ones
• each block has at least one low-volume print
• variety in scale of prints between elements
• lots of stripes (particularly pinstripes), DS-type blenders, ginghams and plaids, dots, vintage-y florals

i really love the mix of the moody neutral colors with the reds, deep blues, and golden yellows i see in these few blocks on the cover. but when i looked around my sewing room, my eyes fell on a dark, moody fall-colored bundle i bought a few years ago. that seemed the way to go and i started pulling more fabrics from there. i started with the DS stash for some of the blenders (which is when i made the happy discovery of all that yellow "katie jumprope" print i needed for my "sunny yellow crossroads" backing). then i pulled out my fall colored liberty drawer for florals in the right tones and feel. i grabbed a few jen kingwell neutral blender prints and some low-volumes. it's a start. 

i kinda need a whole shelf to store this pull on. but there's no room for that here. i already have one in-progress jen kingwell quilt taking up two shelves and half the design wall. (really should get that finished.) but we won't talk about that right now. there's a wensleydale to start!

once i got started, the block went together pretty easily. i used the cutting dimensions from the quilted chicken video, which were pretty good. i did feel some might be a little too big, but they worked and were definitely helpful.

i made a mistake or two along the way. once i forgot to flip the sewn triangle out of the way when i trimmed the seam allowance and cut it off completely - oops! fortunately, there was enough fabric left to redo the piece without additional cutting. another time i sewed one on backwards. unpicking fpp is a lot harder because i'm using a tiny stitch length - about 1.5 on the juki - which is how you do so the paper is easy to tear and remove.

fpp does make a lot of trim waste and none of it salvageable for anything useful. you can see the pile of trimmings from one block above. i didn't know this about the method before.

one perk of fpp is it's supposed to have extremely accurate results. so far that's true for this block although my very last seam on the outer triangles appears to be wide. i didn't lose the point off it but there are a few threads of fabric above the point showing and i sewed right on the line. i guess we'll see if this happens again.

so that's how my afternoon was spent - making a wensleydale test block. conceivably i could make one a day for two months and have a quilt top. i don't know if i want to do that yet or not.