Arcadia Avenue BOM - Now known as Marius' Rainbow Bridge BOM - Piecing Block Two

The past 48+ hours have been some of the worst of my entire life.  Early Friday morning we had to rush my cat Marius to the ER.  He had gone septic after a lifelong struggle with GI issues and we made the agonizing decision to put him down.  There is a gaping hole in our hearts and our lives right now.  The pain is almost unbearable.  In the wake of my tragedy, I forced myself to my sewing room to distract myself from my runaway, grief stricken mind.

I decided to sew my scraps together to "make" some fabric from the remnants of this project.  Here is the result after the first two blocks.

  I had gotten my triangle segments completed and trimmed and they were ready for assembly.  It was rough.  I was going through the motions like a zombie.  What is normally so relaxing and enjoyable for me was torture.  The minutes seemed like hours.  I pushed myself on because I knew doing nothing would be even more painful for me.  I was forcing myself to use quilting to help ease my pain.  Part way through completing the block I realized that I was making a rainbow quilt as my beloved little guy was waiting for me at the Rainbow Bridge.  I broke down a little, but now this quilt is for him and his memory.  I will make it to help myself process my grief and dedicate it to his memory.  By the time I got closer to finishing the block I was feeling a little better and my mind wasn't as filled with my terrible doubts.

Here is my finished Block 2.  My first block for Marius.  My love, my little star.  I miss you so much and you'll be in my heart forever.  Please wait for your brothers, your Sir and me at the Rainbow Bridge until we can join you again.  I love you baby.

Arcadia Avenue BOM - Piecing Block 1

...and we're off!  I finally had a day to myself where I could just focus on Block #1.

I grabbed my bag of pieces, a coffee my book and papers and I was ready to start!  Everything was going well with the first few segments....

...then disaster struck.  My first catastrophic error.  I forgot to use my add a quarter ruler and just cut right next to my plastic template and cut right through my fabric and paper :(.  Luckily, I was only 3 seams in, so I cut myself some new pieces and remade this segment to catch up with the other 11 blocks and get back on track.  Oopsie!  The good thing about doing this early on is that I'll remember it and take my time from now on, hopefully preventing it from happening again.

There were no other snafus and I completed the 12 segments.

Here are a couple pictures of my pile of scraps.  Some of the colored ones are quite large.  It seems like a shame to throw them away.  I should sew them together to make crazy fabric (you have no idea how many times I've said I'm going to do this).  Alas, should I separate out the larger ones and set them aside, or just resign to the fact that I'll never get to doing this and throw them away now?

When I sewed my first two segments together, I didn't match up each point.  I wanted to see how it would come out without using that method.  Ultimately I wasn't happy with the points on that seam, so I pinned up the rest of them as I went.

I did a combination of leaving the paper on and removing the paper.  I removed the paper in the picture below in order to press the seam open.  Once I sewed the adjacent segment, I would remove the paper from the middle segment.  I waited till the end of a quilt once to remove all the paper and will never forgive myself.  I have to remove as I go.  Removing as I go seems to work fine for me.  I starch each segment before I trim the final outline, so I haven't had any issues with stretching yet.  Leaving the paper on while sewing the individual segments together was really nice because the paper being there kept the fabric edges from catching under the machine and flipping under.

Here she is!  It took me around 8 hours to complete the sewing on this block.  Not too shabby for a full day's work.  This was by far the most time consuming block I've ever made and I kept thinking I'd be done in "just a little while" and another few hours would go by and I still wasn't done.  I do love it though, I had a blast making the block and seeing it come together.  

Obviously this quilt is going to be for me and me alone as I won't want to part with this amount of hard work any time soon.  Making a block like this is one of the reasons I always struggle when someone asks me "How long does it take to make a quilt?".

Arcadia Avenue BOM - Cutting, Phase 2

The cutting continues...From my little pile of white scraps I was able to cut all these pieces.  Not too shabby. After all the cutting was complete my white scrap pile was greatly reduced and I didn't have to use that much yardage.

This is a picture of all my medium and light fabric for all of the blocks and the mathy-math used to cut the white fabric.  Next it was time to cut the colors!!!! Sew much fun to dig into my beautiful rainbow of fabrics!  Since I had recently installed a new blade in my rotary cutter I had been cutting 6 pieces at a time of the white fabric and decided to do the same with the rainbow.  I cut strips in the widths I needed (which was the most time consuming part) and made two stacks of six colors.  By doing this I could even cut all twelve colors at once by laying the strips next to each other! What a bonus time saver that was!  Unfortunately I didn't take a picture of that.  In the end I had a good 4" piece left from each of the colors.  I see another great rainbow quilt in the future!  I'm leaving the numbered pins in these in case I get any of the similar colors messed up while making the blocks.

The leftovers of my rainbow fabrics

 Next it was time to cut out the dark fabric.  It was getting later in the evening, but I was on a roll.  It was getting so late that my kitty Freddie just wanted to snuggle up on top of all my nicely cut and labeled pieces.  I had to keep checking underneath him to see what I had cut and make sure to keep my blade far away from him as he relaxed.  My cats each have their own baskets on one of the tables in my sewing room, but he was being so cute, I didn't move him over to his basket this time.

Freddie loves to lay on little pieces of fabric.

To cut the dark strips, I decided to use the same method of stacking six strips at a time.  I mentioned this before, but the fact that this whole quilt goes into multiples of 3, 6, 12, etc is AWESOME.  I made a cheat sheet of what I needed and cut six strips in the widths I needed.  It actually came out really great and I had very little scrap left.  I ended up using about 1.6 yards of the recommended 2 3/4, so I have quite a bit left (I see the potential for a pieced backing in my future).  I made a late push and  powered through cutting it till around 11:00 pm (on a Tuesday night, ugh), which made for a tired day at work the next day.  It was worth it though to end up with these 12 beautifully organized bags for each block.  I'm bagged and tagged and ready to start block 1!  Let the adventure continue!

12 Arcadia Avenue Block Cut, Bagged and Tagged!

Arcadia Avenue Quilt Along

BOM & Fabric Selection 

I saw the beautiful Arcadia Avenue quilt pattern and knew I had to make it.  I love paper piecing and I love a good BOM, so why not!  I picked up the book and started going through my stash.  I really wanted to use stash fabric as much as possible.  Fate was smiling on me as it turns out.  I remembered I had a bunch of half yard cuts in a rainbow of prints that I had bought a few years ago.  I dug them out and found there were exactly 12!  I also had three grey ones from the same collection.  The pattern called for 1 3/4 yard of medium fabric though, so after about an hours worth of math I figured I had just barely enough to do it with the 1 1/2 yards I had.  Fate was on my side!  I decided to use white for the light, so all I needed now was a background and a dark.  I scoured my stash to no avail (I don't have a lot of batiks in large pieces) so to the internet I went.  I decided to check out Hancock's  clearance section.  My goal was to keep to clearance and again, luck was on my side.  I found an amazing navy star print that I thought would work great for the dark and found a beautiful sunflower print in pastels (there's always a limited selection of pastel batiks, so this was a real find).  I wasn't sure if they'd match the other fabrics I had but would be good in my stash if they didn't work and the price was right ($5.99/yd).  When I got them I couldn't have been happier.  Here is the result of my fabric expedition.  The stars truly aligned, making me even more excited to start this project.  I'm a tad nervous about the busy sunflower fabric as my background as it may take away from the beautiful blocks, but I'm going to go all in with it anyway.

Arcadia Avenue Fabrics: Medium at top, Background & Dark in Middle & Rainbow at Bottom

Let's Cut Some Fabric!

Mediums all Cut and Numbered

After numbering my rainbow prints with my Marilee's numbered pins and setting them aside it was time to cut.  I won't be cutting and piecing this BOM month by month, especially since the medium fabric was iffy.  I needed to get it cut up and make sure I had enough and that it was going to work.  The end result is shown on the right.  The math scribbled in my notepad doesn't look like much but was pretty time consuming but helped me to not waste a single piece of fabric.  You can see what I had left for scraps below.  

Medium Scraps

Now, remember, the pattern called for 1 3/4 yd and I only had 1 1/2 yd in three separate pieces and still ended up with this much left over.  Hooray for me!  Not only am I tooting my own horn for being able to add, subtract, multiply, an divide, but so far I'm also really impressed with the way the pattern book is laid out and organized.  Great job Sassafras Lane!  Now I even have some extra in case there are any catastrophic errors later.  

Next it was time to cut the light fabric.  I decided to lighten my white scrap bin since cutting doesn't need to be as accurate for paper piecing and also since I have many pieces in there already cut to the widths I would need for the project.  This would make the cutting take longer overall, but get rid of some of my scraps in the process which is always a good thing.

Light Fabric from my Scrap Bin Before Cutting

I started out with this pile and got to work sorting and pressing them.  The end result is below.  As I suspected, I have pieces in most of the widths I need and will probably be able to use up almost all of these scraps before cutting into my yardage.

Light Fabric after Pressing and Organizing

Another point to note is that I buy my white and black fabric by the bolt and ALWAYS buy the same fabric (kona solid), that way I know I've got the same fabric whether it comes from my scrap bin or off the bolt.

That's as far as I got my first night.  There will be more posts as I go along on this beautiful journey.