The impossibility of random

Most of today was spent joining the rows of Leah Day's Building Blocks Quiltalong. The project is a "quilt as you go" project so, having pieced and quilted 42 individual blocks I now had the task of joining the blocks together in rows and (tomorrow) the rows into a quilt.

Although Leah's pattern just called for two fabrics to be used for the whole quilt, I decided to use a variety of bright solids, one per style of block. Ironically Leah later produced a Spoonflower cheater cloth which was almost identical to my finished quilt - great minds think alike! 

Here's my quilt ready to be finished off with the sashing between the rows.

Despite changing my fabrics, I still closely followed Leah's pattern so, when it called for the blocks to be sewn together in a particular order, I still followed along. Because I had used different colours to Leah, that meant the some of the neighbouring blocks had high contrast, some low. 

I'm normally a very "matchy-matchy" quilter; my nightmare is a pattern that says "randomly sew one piece A to one piece B". But what if the fabrics match?! Or clash?! Or there isn't enough contrast?! I don't think I'm ever going to manage to sew a scrappy project because my quilts and fabrics have to be planned out to the n-th degree. This was a real problem in the Mister DJ quilt where I was meant to randomly sew strips together. I confess I didn't but it still came out great. 

Happily it's not just me that had a problem with choosing things at random. Apparently humans are pre-programmed to find patterns and create order and can't therefore make truly random choices. Even when we think we are making random choices, we're actually still broadly following a pattern.

The fact that Leah's quilt now has two neighbouring pink blocks and a few clashing colour combinations is actually great - for once I've actually been random! Although technically I suppose I'm still following Leah's pattern so I'm not really being random after all. Drat.