Day 316, where we take a look inside the workings of my brain.
I’ve been working away at the math and the yardage for the shadow/sashing on the polaroid blocks. I’m usually pretty good but this time it took me waaay longer than I will admit to figuring out. I started with the great-but-basic tutorial from Johanna @Stuff I Made. I went off the rails pretty quickly though; she and I used different polaroid block tutorials which I thought yielded the same results. I therefore got stuck on “if her block finishes at 4 inches and all these pieces are x, y, z inches, why the hell is mine different?” Incompetent buffoonery on my part!
I figured it all out though, yay me! So next I thought I would make a couple of test blocks to try different shadow colours. I don’t want to use a straight solid black but I found a couple of options in the garage stash.
On the left is a Timeless Treasures “sketch” fabric and the right is a lovely essex linen type fabric. It’s 54″ wide and I got it from an estate sale (2$/m). I split it in half with a friend who was visiting from Nova Scotia in 2014 and my half was over a metre.

I chose a light grey solid to go with both of these for the test blocks, then looked at the tutorial picture again. “Maybe I should try out a darker grey too” I thought so I chose a grey solid that was darker than my first choice. Can you see where this is going?
Here is my first test block:

I failed to check the contrast between the shadow and the grey solid. *headdesk*
“Maybe it will be better with the other potential shadow fabric?” I thought hopefully.

NOPE.
Test block no.3:

And block no.4

I think block no.4 is the winner, unless I try a lighter grey solid. That will be on a different, less frustrating day. But yay I got to sew today?
And because it’s Wednesday and this is definitely a work in progress, I’m linking up with
