Looking at my version of this block, it’s clearly a turtle, but nobody else seems to see it. The official name for the block is … oh, wait. All this time and I’ve never noticed that the triangles in the Dear Jane book don’t have names like the square blocks do.

But if they did, I bet this one wouldn’t be named anything to do with turtles. Possibly this is because Jane used a white fabric with weird brown blotches on it for the original version of the block. If hers was a turtle, it was some sort of diseased albino turtle.

In my very turtle-y green fabric, however, the likeness cannot be overlooked. The actual fabric is not uniformly green, though. It’s that famous green with scattered red and white flowers that I have fussy cut with varying degrees of success on other blocks:

This block was no exception, and I had fun from the beginning deciding how I was going to fussy cut the fabric to play up the turtle resemblance. The free-floating triangular turtle feet were so small that I felt it best to just stick with green-only areas of the fabric. On the big canvas of the diamond-shaped turtle shell, I had fun arranging a line of red flowers curving its way along the turtle’s back. This turtle has style!

For the head of the turtle, I auditioned a number of different motif choices with the members of my hand quilting group. Of course, we’re meeting virtually, and I couldn’t figure out how to hold everything in place in front of the laptop camera … so I ended up taking a picture of each layout with my phone, then holding the phone screen up to my laptop camera. It was extremely high tech.

We considered using white flowers as boggly eyes (and even briefly toyed with the idea of actual boggly eyes):

Fun fact: as part of writing this article and determining how to spell “boggly”, I learned that almost everyone else on earth calls them “googly eyes”. Therefore, I am still unsure of how to spell “boggly” but this is what I’m going with.

Ultimately, I decided anything boggly would detract from the seriousness of my quilt, so I went with a more subtle, flower-free turtle noggin:

This was another one of those blocks where I got a lot done at my hand quilting group meeting (you can see that the turtle has three of four legs done by the end of the afternoon), but then worked at a snail’s (or even a turtle’s) pace for quite a while afterwards to wrap up the block. We’ve really got to start meeting twice a month – just think how much progress I’d make!