Somewhere in my delusional mind, I decided I could someday complete a ridiculously large and complicated paper-pieced quilt that I saw in a book and fell in love with. The book is “A Paper Pieced Garden” by Maaike Bakker and Francoise Maarse. The book is full of beautiful paper-pieced blocks combined with appliques. The cover alone is stunning.

So I started out wanting to make the full quilt shown above and I made the center bird. I then proceeded to make the four pine cones surrounding the bird. And that’s where I nearly lost it. There are 32 pieces per pine cone! Each piece I measured ahead of time so I knew what size pieces of fabric I needed to cut. I wrote it all down on one copy of the pine cone pattern.

I then made another copy of the pattern and cut the paper pattern apart. After I cut the fabric for each piece, I clipped the tiny paper pattern piece with the corresponding fabric pieces. It ended up looking like this. I’m making 4 pine cones so there are 4 fabric pieces per pattern piece.

I really think this little system saved my sanity. Within a couple hours, I had all 4 pine cones sewn. So now I have one bird and 4 pine cones. Maybe I’ll stick with making the smaller “winter” quilt. Either way, I think that keeping the paper pattern pieces with the fabric pieces really made life easier and helped me keep it all together.