My first inspiration for this probably came eight years ago when we moved to Powell River. From my kitchen window I can see a big tree across the street on the grounds of City Hall. I’ve seen it through many seasons, as well as some storms that have broken branches but never toppled the tree. I kept thinking I should take photos of the tree at each equinox; of course that hasn’t happened yet.

The Splendid Sampler 2 sew-along that I’m involved in had Flowering Tree block; someone in the Facebook community suggested that it would be nice done in colours to represent each of the four seasons. That sparked a memory I had of a Hands Across the Water block that was to be done in different colours based on your last name (the colours represented four different seasons).

About the same time we had a reminder that our miniature was due early in September. I knew that when the Hands Across the Water block came out I purchased fabric to make all four seasons. The fabric was in a bin, buried beneath several other bins, but when I opened it there was no pattern.

I checked online for the pattern but I didn’t remember what year the block was from (2015 as it turns out) or which Guild was sponsoring the event (Quadra Island). But I am in charge of our blog site and I hoped that at some point the block had been posted. As t turned out the pattern had been removed quite some time ago but I was able to find it in my saved files.

I don’t generally sew with batiks (they don’t have enough “give” to let me fudge on the sizing) but I bought the fabric so long ago I probably hadn’t yet realized I didn’t like batiks. The block was paper-pieced so it was quite precise and I didn’t need the fudging. The quilting pattern in the sashing is called Cascade.