After trying the new label-based technique on my last block, it felt good to be back to plain old hand piecing again.

When I started this block, I was planning to write about how this block would go so much faster with machine piecing. You could sew strips of fabric together into “striped fabric”, then cut that into triangles and sew them together to make the block. Easy peasy.

In fact, once I got started, the block went together pretty quickly the old-fashioned way. Yes, it took some time to cut out all the strips separately, mark the stitching lines, and sew them back together … but I don’t know that it was that much slower than the machine-sewing method. It was definitely more portable.

While at the beginning of the block I was feeling somewhat sorry for myself, and whatever I’d been thinking when I decided to piece the whole quilt by hand … by the end of the block, I was feeling pleased with both my decision and my progress.

I actually finished the block four days ago. The block itself went together quickly, but the blog article about the block is going together extremely slowly.

The whole time I was stitching it together, I thought the name of this traditional block was Spider Web. When I went to confirm that (yes, I fact-check my blog posts!), I searched for “spider web quilt block” and was presented with oodles of blocks with striped isosceles triangles combined into an octagon, rather than striped right triangles combined into a square.

The research librarian in me was annoyed that I didn’t have the correct name for the block, and I will admit that I let it hold me back from writing the article while I searched fruitlessly for the answer (I still don’t know the correct name for this block).

I’ve been working on an upgrade of my quilt guild’s website, and I’d been alternating between working on the website and working on the “spider web” block. This provided a good variety of tasks that kept me interested in working on both.

Once I finished the block, working on the website and the blog article didn’t have the same thrill. I was alternating between two activities that were essentially the same: sitting at the computer and typing.

I have felt trapped in the web of this not-a-spider-web-block article, unable to move forward on either the quilting project or the quilt guild website.

This weekend I was sitting with my hand quilting group – working on a different quilt project, of course, because I didn’t have this article written or a new block cut out yet – and thinking how silly it was to stall an entire quilting project (not to mention a website upgrade) because of writer’s block. The blog, which was supposed to be a motivational tool for me, was turning into a de-motivational tool.

After I got home, I ordered myself to sit down for 15 minutes and just write random thoughts about the block. Hopefully it would, as usual, start to coalesce and weave itself into a semi-coherent blog article.

It took some time, and a lot of moving around of my random thoughts, to gel them into something vaguely resembling an article. I still feel like it’s a little light on actual quilting info, but there just wasn’t that much interesting to say about the construction of this block. I hope this is not a trend.

So, there you have it, folks. Perhaps not the most scintillating blog article ever, but one that allows me to move on to the next, hopefully more exciting, block in this project.