Welcome! Andrea - from the Willow Cottage Quilt Company - and I are delighted that you can join us to explore the gardens and lavender field of la belle France in our latest block of the month.
Over the next ten months we will be making four feature blocks, four parterre blocks, a beautiful monogram and a lavender-filled border dotted with butterflies. And, if you joined us last year, you'll know that there will be some fun bonus projects along the way.
Your parcels will be posted on the second Tuesday of each month (which is a slight change from last year but avoids all of the Bank Holidays!).
I like to think of this page as our group journal where I can share my top tips with you along with my inspiration for each of the blocks, so be sure to check in every month when you've received your parcel. You can also join our private Facebook group so that you can come and chat with us there too.
Andrea and I both encourage you to share your progress on Instagram and Facebook with the #jardindelavandebom hashtag so that we can all encourage one another.
Scroll down to access the pages of our journal...
Month 1: October, Parterre Sud
Month 2: November, Pannier
Month 3: December, Parterres Nord & Ouest
Month 4: January, Arrosoir
Month 5: February, Parterre Est & Papillons
Month 6: March, Maison de Jardiniere
Month 7: April, Monogramme
Month 8: May, Brouette
Jardin de Lavande Sampler: month 1
Welcome to month one of the Jardin de Lavande, Parterre Sud.
And our journey begins! This is a quilt inspired by French gardens so we are going to tumble back in time to the end of the fifteenth century to visit our first French garden at Chateau Gaillard in Amboise, a few miles west of Tours in the Loire valley.
The young king Charles VIII, whilst campaigning in Italy, rather envied the exquisite renaissance palaces of the Italian dukes. He returned from Naples with a good deal of looted furniture and artwork, an entourage of Italian craftsman and a Benedictine monk, Dom Pacello da Mercogliano, who had an exceptional gift for making gardens.
Dom Pacello laid out a 'paradise on earth' for his royal patron, creating formal terraces, flower beds and lawns, criss-crossed by gravel paths and animated by fountains. He also introduced potted orange trees to France, growing them in half-barrels that could be over-wintered inside. Dom Pacello went on to serve two more Kings and was gifted the Chateau by Francis I in exchange for a bouquet of orange blossom each spring. Not a bad bargain.
Mary Queen of Scots spent much of her childhood at the Chateau Gaillard - which must have made Scottish summers somewhat disappointing - and Dom Pacello's contemporary, Leonardo da Vinci, also spent his final few years at the French court in Amboise, which is why the Mona Lisa now hangs in the Louvre.
We are making a gentle start to our Block of the Month programme with the Parterre Sud block - and I'm quite sure yours will be a work of art too! - which features Maple Farm's Gwendolyn and Cherrybush prints. The latter has the feel of orange tree leaves to me and I particularly want you to hang on to your scraps of that one, we'll need them in a later block...
But the main item in this month's parcel is the Jardin de Lavande Pattern Book. Andrea and I are excited to share a full colour pattern book with you this year and hope it will whet your appetite for the months ahead.
This month's techniques...
Strip-piecing is a wonderful way of creating lots of tiny little squares without actually cutting & joining them individually. Not only does it save time but the results are neater and more even. Win, win!
Put a couple pins in your strip sets before you join them: it will stop them shifting as you sew, which can lead to a bowed seam (and we don't want that)
And take your time to keep your seam nice and straight when you press it. Pressing towards the darker fabric lets those seams nest beautifully when you make the four patches.
Jardin de Lavande: month 2
Welcome to month two of the Jardin de Lavande, Pannier.
This month we are travelling south west along the Loire valley to visit a contemporary French garden with its roots firmly in the past. Le Prieuré d’Orsan, created in the ruins of a C12th priory just south of Bourges, was inspired by medieval tapestries and is quite possibly the most beautiful potager - or kitchen garden - in all of France.
Parisian architects, Sonia Lesot and Patrice Taravella, restored the crumbling priory and recreated the cloisters with pleached hornbeam. They enclosed the priory with fifteen gardens, separated by espaliered hedges and artfully woven chestnut withies, which have been planted with herbs, vegetables and fruit by gardener Gilles Guillot.
The priory is now a rather stylish hotel and all of the produce from the garden is used in the restaurant. I'm not sure if it's gathered in French market baskets, but in such a magical setting I like to think so.
This month we are exploring the snowball technique to create an elegant little market basket of our own, using Maple Farm's Pauline, Birdie and Cherrybush prints. This is a more complex block than last month with more elements, so take your time with the assembly and, if the snowball technique is a new one for you, practise on some scrap fabric first.
Your parcel includes a delicious bundle of floss as we are going to use some very simple embroidery stitches to add stalks of lavender to our baskets. I don't want you to fret about the embroidery element of the block: it will work just as well without it but I'll be posting a video tutorial in a couple of days to show you how easy the stitches are to achieve. I actually waited until I'd joined my blocks together before adding the embroidery, but you can embroider individual blocks if you'd find that easier.
You will also notice that there is an additional Tiny Farm print included this month. We won't be using it in the quilt but I will - of course - be giving you some ideas for it in a later month, so put it somewhere safe for now!
This month's techniques...
Snowballing the corner of a piece of fabric - by adding a 45º triangle of another fabric - gives the illusion of a rounded corner. We are also going to use it to create traditional flying geese units.
Start by marking a diagonal line on the back of a square of fabric.
Pin it, right sides together, to a corner of the base fabric.
Stitch on the line, flip the square ‘open’ and press, trimming away the back layers.
Jardin de Lavande: month 3
Welcome to month three of the Jardin de Lavande, Parterres Nord & Ouest.
Our journey this month takes us to the outskirts of Paris and to the best known garden in France: Versailles. It was created for Louis the XIV - the Sun King - who remains the world's longest reigning monarch, ruling France from 1643 until 1715.
The royal gardener, Andre Le Notre, began work in 1661 and it took four decades to create two thousand acres of elegant gardens, designed to be in total harmony with the palace. From the Hall of Mirrors a formal axis stretches as far as the eye can see, including the mile-long canal - which took a decade to excavate - adorned with Gondolas brought from Venice along with a team of Gondoliers. Pools of water reflected light into the palace, arrow-straight pathways and dainty parterres provided the perfect setting for courtiers to promenade (and shady groves for them to get up to no good).
The royal obsession with oranges continued and courtiers were expected to relinquish their own prized trees to adorn the vast Orangery. Louis was so pleased with the gardens that he wrote his own guide, How to Show the Gardens of Versailles, lest visitors miss any of the 400 statues or 50 fountains. And those visitors could include French citizens, who were allowed to walk in the gardens under one condition: they had to be suitably dressed. Those without the required finery could rent an outfit at the entrance.
One little known fact about Louis XIV was his penchant for hot chocolate, although at the time it was rumoured to be an aphrodisiac which may have had something to do with it (Louis is better known, like many of his predecessors, for having many mistresses). His great-grandson, Louis XV was equally smitten - with both chocolate and mistresses - as was Marie Antoinette.
In keeping with our inspiration, this month we are making not one but two Parterre blocks. They both use very similar techniques - the snowballed corner that we explored in last month's Pannier block - but with very different results. Both also make use of the bold Gwendelyn print, pairing it with Pauline and the whimsical Farm Tools.
Finally there is a Christmas treat in this month's parcel: an enamel Pannier pin, which I hope will always be a lovely reminder of this year's block of the Month programme. I think it's only right that we toast the New Year with a glass of Champagne. Or should that be Hot Chocolate? What ever you choose, Andrea and I send you our warmest wishes this Christmas.
This month's techniques...
This month we are working with directional fabric, that is, the Maple Farm prints which have a definite 'right way up'.
When piecing the corner units of the Parterre Nord block, I marked the centre corners which were not being snowballed with a water-soluble pen.
I also marked the 'outer' corners of the print squares for the centre unit, so that I could draw my diagonal line in the right direction
Also bear in mind that the print will appear to 'change direction' when you flip the squares open. Test before you trim.
Jardin de Lavande: month 4
Welcome to month four of the Jardin de Lavande, Arrosoir.
This month we are heading south to visit a Provencal garden. Le Jardin de la Louve, created thirty years ago by textile designer Nicole de Vesian, is the tiniest garden we will visit at just 500 square metres spread over a steep hillside a few miles north of Aix-en-Provence.
In her last decade Nicole artfully sculpted this unpromising site into a work of art: hand-clipping every plant and sourcing vintage stone ornaments to enhance her creation, including a beautiful stone water trough. Photographs of the garden usually show it holding a vintage galvanised watering can.
But there are no hedges or parterres. All of the plants are clipped into soft pillows of foliage, gently framing the ravishing views across the valley. Nicole chose a palette of plants to cope with the dry soil, mainly evergreen, including Cypress, Box, Rock Roses, Silverberry, Rosemary, Santolina, Germander and, of course, Lavender, which adds a haze of purple over its tightly clipped neighbours. The resulting garden is elegant, restrained and - although it borrows much from Japanese gardens - quintessentially French.
The Arrosoir - or watering can - block that we are making this month shares a few elements with the Pannier block that we made in November. It also features a quarter square triangle block, which we are going to trim down using the custom washi tape in this month's parcel.
As well as the gorgeous Maple Farm Pauline in umber and lavender Gracie prints for our block, you'll notice that there are two additional prints in this month's parcel: Wheatflower in dijon and rosehip Farm Flowers. I want you to set these aside for next month's block. And I also want you to set aside the spare quarter square triangle you'll be making, as I have plans for that one too!
PLEASE NOTE: there is an error in the cutting instructions and you will need to cut an additional 4½" square of background fabric to make the QST in step 3 and 2 1½" x 3½" umber pieces to join to the QST sides in step 5. Apologies friends.
This month's techniques...
Oversizing a block slightly - like this month's quarter square triangle - and then trimming it down is a really useful way of improving your accuracy
Finding the corner on my ruler with a marked diagonal line, I used washi tape to mark an additional diagonal line which made it easier to find the centre of the QST
{the photo shows the unit half way through trimming}
Jardin de Lavande Block of the Month
Jardin de Lavande: month 5
Welcome to month five of the Jardin de Lavande, Parterre Est and Papillons
This month we are in the depths of the Normandy countryside where, half way between Bayeaux and Caen, we find the exquisite Chateau de Brecy.
The 17th-century château is hidden away behind a high wall with a beautiful sky blue gate. The gardens were laid out as an homage to the goddess Flora, reputedly by the architect Mansart (he of the attic roof) and rise in four terraces, each slightly wider than the last to play with your sense of perspective in a slightly more modest way than Versailles.
Its sleepy location meant it remained undisturbed, falling into gentle decline after the French Revolution and somehow avoiding destruction during the second world war. It was awoken from its slumber in the 1950s by novelist Jacques de Lacretelle and his wife Yolande, who revived the gardens and planted the delicate parterre de broderie on the house terrace. He described the garden as the “finery of an Italian princess thrown over the shoulders of a little Normandy peasant girl”
The sky blue paintwork seen on the gate is repeated on the benches and planters throughout the garden and inspired my choice of a blue door and shutters on next month's block, the Maison de Jardiniere.
We will be building on the quarter square triangle technique we learned last month to create our final parterre and to make a start on the lavender borders for our quilt with the Papillon blocks, which use a partial QST. You will be using the two additional Fat Eighths that we sent you last month - Wheatflower in dijon and rosehip Farm Flowers - with this month's dijon Cherrybush and Tiny Farm in mauve for the Parterre Est.
And while we're making cute things with quarter square triangles, our treat this month is a bonus block: L'Oranger. The block finishes at 14" square and can be used in any Petit Four project. And, of course, I will be sharing a distinctly French-themed bonus project with you soon which makes perfect use of it! Please note that this month's treat is the pattern only and extra fabric has not been included. Click here for the tutorial.
L'Oranger Bonus Block...
The L'Oranger block was inspired by French gardeners' obsession with potted orange trees. It makes good use of the left-over quarter square triangle unit from the Arrosoir block and scraps from your blocks. Although I want you to hang on to the darker purple scraps: we'll be needing those for the Monogramme block!
I thought it would be useful to post a photo of the back of the block so that you can get a good view of how I pressed my seams :-)
Jardin de Lavande: month 6
Welcome to month six of the Jardin de Lavande, Maison de Jardinere.
This month we are travelling to the Dordogne in south-west France, to visit a real-life secret garden, Le Jardin d'Eyrignac.
D'Eyrignac has been in the same family for more than 500 years and Gilles Sermadiras de Pouzols de Lile - the father of the present owner - grew up playing in the overgrown gardens surrounding the 16th century chateau. After a career in interior design Gilles devoted his 'retirement' to unearthing the stone step, walls and pools from the neglected garden of his childhood and reviving the gardens.
Gilles' design was inspired by, but not a slavish copy of, the past and is now regarded as the finest topiary garden in France, with it's elegant allées, buttressed hedges, spirals, pyramids and fanciful tiered trees in yew, hornbeam and box. All are pruned in the traditional manner - with hand-shears, skill and patience - by teams of gardeners. Up to five times during the growing season!
The tower at the centre of the garden, the Pavilion of Rest, reputedly housed the estate's silkworms in centuries past. Silkworms are very picky eaters and insist on a diet of leaves from the Mulberry tree, which thrives in the warm, sunny climate of the south of France and made it an important centre of silk production. But we will be concerning ourselves with housing gardeners, not silkworms, and the Maison de Jardinière block we are making this month is an homage to all the gifted French gardeners we have been meeting on our block of the month journey.
Those of you who've sewn with me before will know that my background is in conservation architecture, so I can never resist including a house block in my quilts and adding all the little details that give old buildings their special sense of place. In this case the distinctive blue shutters (Maple Farm Birdie in blueberry) and creamy-coloured stone walls (Tiny Farm Berries in sand). We are using rosehip Wheatflower to recreate the roof tiles and windows of Gracie in Teal to reflect the sunny skies. Also included in this month's package is Tiny Farm in mauve which I want you to put aside for next month.
This month's techniques...
This month we are going to create the steep old-fashioned roof of our Maison de Jardiniere. We will essentially be using the Triangle-in-a-square technique, which I've described in detail here.
Although there is a template at the back of your pattern book, this month's notion is my brand new CakeSlice Template which will make marking the placement line on your blocks a breeze. Here is another copy of the instructions, just in case yours go astray and here is a quick tutorial.
Please note that the template is used to mark a line rather than for cutting, as tempting as that may be. I have found keeping the background piece in place as a foundation gives the most accurate results.
Jardin de Lavande: month 7
Welcome to month seven of the Jardin de Lavande, Monogramme.
This month we travel north to a tiny Normandy village that is known throughout the world: Giverny. The magical garden created by Impressionist painter Claude Monet at the turn of the twentieth century, is recorded in paintings that grace galleries across the globe.
Monet’s vision turned a weedy plot of marshland abutting a railway track - which he spotted from a train - into a careful composition of shady walks bordered by deep, colourful borders and that lily pond. And each year (well, most years) more than 500,000 people travel to Giverny to visit a place they’ve only seen in paintings.
Monet had spent his career innovating: whereas previous artists made sketches and retreated to their studios to mix their paint, he utilised new-fangled tubes of ready mixed paint to work outside, painting at speed to capture the ever-changing light. When he visited the 1889 Paris World Fair and saw a display of waterlilies by renowned breeder, Joseph Bory Latour-Marliac, it was love at first sight. He spent the next decade - and a small fortune - buying waterlilies from Marliac for his newly created pond.
He surrounded them with weeping willows, elegant bamboos and exotic flowers that, reflected in the water, form the the perfect foil to sheets of waterlily foliage. He wrote: "I saw, all of a sudden, that my pond had become enchanted... Since then, I have had no other model." Indeed he spent the last two decades of his life recording it and those paintings have become his signature.
Which (forgive me) brings us to our own signature block: le Monogramme. I chose to make an 'L' for lavender for my quilt, but this is your quilt and I want you to choose your own monogramme. This month's parcel includes Fat Eighths of Maple Farm Cherrybush in mauve, blue Farm Berries, Farm Flowers in lavender and slate Meadow to create your letter, along with any scraps of lavender, mauve and lilac prints from previous blocks.
Most of you will also have a half yard of lilac Meadow in your parcels to set aside for the quilt binding. My apologies to my lovely Australian ladies: I post out your parcels a little earlier and my fabric - ordered six months ago! - hadn't arrived at that point. Rest assured it will be in next month's parcel.
Sac à Baguette Bonus Project...
Remember the L'Oranger block we made back in February? Well I have the perfect project for it: a bag to carry your fresh baguettes back from the boulangerie. Or the supermarket. You can find the tutorial here.
Behind the scenes in the studio: the little stool is for me to stand on!
Jardin de Lavande: month 8
Welcome to month eight of the Jardin de Lavande, Brouette.
We have reached the penultimate stop on our garden tour of France and this month we return to the Loire valley to visit a garden that has taken ornamental kitchen gardening to new heights and inspired us all to plant our winter window boxes with frilly, purple cabbages: Villandry.
Like many renaissance chateaux, Villandry's formal gardens were swept away in the C18th. Two centuries later Villandry was rescued by Spanish doctor Joachim Carvallo and his American wife Ann, who restored the chateau and painstakingly reinstated the gardens.
The Carvallos created a music-themed ornamental garden - a symphony of lavender and box - a water garden, themed parterres, a maze and a splendid herb garden, but it's their re-imagining of the potager décoratif (or ornamental kitchen garden) with its complex geometry which steals the show and could inspire a quilt all on its own, as a satellite photograph will attest.
Our highly decorative wheel barrow will look perfectly at home, adorned with Maple Farm's Pauline in teal and umber Wheatflower prints. There are also FQs of Gwendolyn in umber and green Farm Flowers - to set aside for the border - and our notion this month is a Hera marker, which we are going to use to create the wheel barrow's handles and stand. As well as the Fat Quarter of off-white background fabric for the Brouette block, you will also have a separate half-yard cut of off-white in your parcel, which you will use when you assemble your quilt.
And here's where it gets a bit confusing (not least for Andrea and I): if you are in North America you will also have a half yard of the pine green Meadow print in your parcels; Australian ladies, you will have a half yard of Meadow lilac, which arrived too late for last month's parcel; here in the UK I am still playing fabric-delivery-chicken - and my Meadow pine will actually be arriving tomorrow - so rather than hold up the parcels, I'll send it next month!
This month's techniques...
Although I am fond of using a bias tape maker, for wider or shorter strips I prefer to use a Hera marker...
Holding it like a pen, I use the curved edge to mark a crease ¼” in from the edge I want to fold over. I then finger press that seam allowance, before pressing with a hot iron. An optional spritz of starch will help hold the crease.
Jardin de Lavande: month 9
Welcome to month nine of the Jardin de Lavande, Lavande.
We have arrived at our final destination: the glorious lavender fields of Provence. Paris-based photographer Mary Quincy captured them beautifully when she toured the lavender fields in a vintage 2CV called Albert. You can see more of her exquisite photographs of the Valensole lavender fields and the surrounding villages here.
Provence is synonymous with lavender, but where did that story begin? The Romans cultivated lavender to fragrance their laundry - the name is derived from the Latin lavare, to wash - and brought it with them to Provence. The soil and climate suited it perfectly. By the nineteenth century lavender was the mainstay of Provencal farms and so prized it was known as blue gold. Much of the fragrant lavender went to supply perfume production in nearby Grasse: it takes 100 kilos of lavender to make just one litre of lavender oil.
Nowadays lavender is a mainstay of the tourist industry, with visitors flocking to the lavender fields in July to see it in bloom and taking away bags of dried lavender, blocks of lavender-scented olive oil soap and jars of lavender honey as souvenirs.
This month we are creating the lavender sprigs for our pieced border. You can have lots of fun using all of your lilac, mauve and Blueberry scraps, the more, the merrier. Your parcel includes Farm Tools in grey and green to add to your cool scraps for the leaves and rosehip Tiny Farm for the little lavender bracts. There are also a couple of Tiny Farm prints left over from your Fat Eighth bundles and... one last surprise: a Carte Postale quilt label for you to personalise, either with a fabric pen or embroidery.
In our final month we wanted to take a moment to thank you all for taking part in our block of the month. Quite frankly you have all been merveilleuse: sharing your tips so generously - you are all so much better at embroidery than me! - and supporting one another on Instagram and in our Facebook group. What a wonderful journey this has been in your company.
Merci beaucoup mes chers,
Nicola & Andrea xx
This month's techniques...
Pieced borders are as near to dressmaking as we quilters get: they need to fit! Here are my favourite tips: -
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Measure, measure, measure. Especially as you're going along: a slightly-off seam allowance will soon multiply (ask me how I know...)
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The cream inner border is your friend. Don't cut the inner border strips until you've pieced the border. If the centre of the quilt is slightly too small you can cut them wider. And if the borders are slightly too small you can cut them narrower.
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Use lots of pins when attaching the pieced border. It takes a little extra time, but will stop all those little seams misbehaving.
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if there is any fullness in the seam - either in the pieced border or the inner border - feed it through your machine full-side down: the feed dogs with distribute it evenly so you won't have any puckers or pleats.
My final tip is to take a break if things aren't going to plan. Make a cup of tea. Come and have a chat in the Facebook group. Or, dare I say it, try a little lavender essential oil, it's supposed to be very calming...