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.