Off the Rails

One might think that this is a simple pattern--two rectangles sewn together, every other block turned 90 degrees. What's to mess up?

I have this 'gift': if there's only two ways to interpret something, I will invariably and immediately find a third. Along those same lines, I can find a whole 'nother way to construct, incorrectly, a simple pattern.

It was my belief, based upon nothing at all, that all the rows were identical and that rows 2 and 4 simply needed to be rotated 180° to construct the block. Building on that, I started in sewing: mating squares 1&2, then 3&4, then sewing them together into a row to match the first row on the diagram.

Chaining all the rows together--that would come in handy later!

How productive I was! Zooming along without a care. Somewhere in the production I decided I'd take a sneak peek at how a block would look, and discovered...

Hmm--idea for a tessellating quilt. Later.

Well, frick on a stick!

How far had I sewn with my misbegotten belief?

Pretty damn far.

Okay, time to really look at the pattern and find the logic. It's a series of Ls, all going in the same direction, with every other row offset by one block (the L is split).

What I needed to do was move the end of every other row to the beginning (or vice-versa; regardless, two of those rows needed their Ls separated).

I did this painstakingly for the first few blocks, laying out all the rows and carefully unsewing/resewing the first and third.

Remove ends of rows 1 and 3.

Attach those ends to beginnings of rows 1 and 3.

Eventually a faster way occurred to me. As long as two rows had Ls side-by-side, and two rows had the L in the center, it didn't really matter in what order they were initially chained together. I had been planning to clip the thread chains apart for the final construction of each block anyway.

Laying out a chain of 4 rows, 

 I sewed the bottom edge of two of the rows (in this picture, the first two on the left).

Then I pulled out the seam above it, the one holding the two sets of rectangles together.

You can probably guess how I know which seam will lead you astray if you're not paying attention!

This split the L with the result being that both halves were now sewn to either side of the middle L.

Having eliminated the need to lay every row out for manipulation, this method of correction went much quicker. Not as quickly as doing it correctly to begin with, but as they say: "I can blog about it!"

You've seen snatches of the completed flimsy in previous posts--here's how it looked on the design wall:

I chose to keep each block as close to a color family as I could. Some were constructed using the same dark fabric for all the Ls, but the fun challenge was combining disparate fabrics into a cohesively-colored whole.