Arcadia Avenue: Spiderweb
Last year I discovered the Arcadia Avenue quilt pattern by Sassafras Lane in my local quilt shop, and I bought it because I try to find something to buy every time I go in there so I don’t look like I just showed up to get that month’s free yard of fabric and leave. Anyway, I thought it was so beautiful that I made a special trip back to the quilt shop that month to buy fabric for it. Also in said quilt shop was a sample quilt with the most unusual colorway. It was pastel corals and aquas paired with a stormy medium grey. Of course the shop had absolutely none of those fabrics in stock at all because it was a kit, but I was smitten with this color combo. So I decided for my Arcadia Avenue I would do a pastel rainbow with a medium-dark grey for the dark. Sadly they also didn’t have a very nice medium-dark grey so I had to settle for a dark greyish-blue. For the medium fabric in the quilt I took a gamble and instead of choosing a grey like many of the sample quilts, I decided to go with a fabric that had all the other rainbow colors in it, but much more saturated and bright. I think it definitely paid off (even if I do have to be a little careful about which pieces I use on which color).
Spiderweb is just the latest block I’ve finished – just this past weekend. But it’s the 8th block that I’ve completed, which puts me at 2/3rds done, and just 4 more to go. Here’s a look back at the other blocks since they won’t be getting their own posts as I finish them.
If I’m really on top of it and it doesn’t have too many pieces it takes me 3-4 days to do one of these blocks. Day 1 is typically cutting (and may be combined with the Day 4 of a previous block if I’m extra motivated). Day 2 I do half of the wedges, and Day 3 I do the other half. Then Day 4 I sew them all together. I’ve pretty much figured out the assembly line style for this, including a particular way to stack and flip them when trimming and ironing so that they end up in the right order. This is important only because I cut the “colors” in a stack so if I manage to get the blocks in the right order, then I can just take the right color right off the top and I don’t have hunt through the stack to match them. Usually when I attempt to explain this people’s heads explode.
Half the wedges done. No one ever appreciates this stage much because it’s really hard to imagine what the mirror of this is.
This particular one I struggled with. Day 1 and 2 were grueling and I just couldn’t keep the pace up for Day 3. Of course the reason for this is because Spiderweb has the second highest number of pieces per wedge out of the whole thing at 17. (The highest is 18 in the first block, which I think is called Fly Away With Me. I did it first because it was present first in the book, but I can totally see how it would turn people off to doing the rest of them because it felt like I had sprinted a marathon after it.) So it took a few more days than normal to do this one because I would get tired after about 3 pieces and then quit and go back to it later.
The other thing is that I actually haven’t worked on this quilt since I did the last block in October. Part of this is because I actually can’t craft when I’m too stressed, but a bigger part is that on the block before this one, the one with the triangles spinning around, some of the pieces in that were really cut too small and didn’t leave enough fudge room for the seam allowances that foundation paper piecing requires. That made it really frustrating and not fun for me, so I became a little gun shy, particularly about this block which had a lot of little thin pieces. I was also afraid that if I cut them bigger I wouldn’t have enough fabric left, which is probably a largely unfounded fear. But unlike the light, medium, and dark fabrics, the color fabrics did not have pre-cutting directions, much to my dismay.
What helped me overcome this block as doing the Inside Out Pineapple block for the block exchange, which I have not blogged about quite yet but fully intend to because quilt group is coming up in two days and I’ll be getting the next focus fabric then. Anyway, the Inside Out Pineapple block didn’t come with cutting instructions so I had to write my own, and in the course of that I discovered that having an extra quarter inch on top of the seam allowances was pretty much the perfect amount of fudge factor. So doing that block gave me the confidence to come back to Arcadia Avenue and measure all the pieces make alterations to the cutting instructions. Turns out I only needed to add a quarter inch to the measurements for the medium fabric, which I did, and it was pretty much smooth sailing. But next time I am definitely picking one of the blocks with fewer pieces in, if there’s any left.
