Leaves in the Forest

 

This turned out to be a much longer project that I imagined it to be. It started in late August as a quilt along at Twiddletails.  I thought it would be a good way to use up some scraps in colors I don't commonly use.  I also thought it would be a good start/stop project that I could work on when I had a few spare minutes.   That part failed to happen.  

I was using some leftover background fabric and figured early on that I didn't have enough.  So I bought a second.  I spent a lot of time remembering to do some of each design on each fabric.  I also found that some fabric conservation methods took me longer, mostly in plotting out how to reuse some cut-aways I'd normally discard.  I also flipped the color schemes on a number of these blocks accidentally, but in this case it just helped to add variation. 

When I was planning the backgrounds to spread them out, I discovered that the block counts on the pattern were off by a couple.   I laid them out yesterday, and am still somehow short by 1.  Also, when I got to the final corner layout, I did not have the same blocks left as indicated on the pattern. 

I sewed together the top 4 rows, with the backing paper still on as that was the way I was taught to do paper piecing as it keeps any bias edges steady.  After removing all the papers from that section, I'm re-thinking the plan and will try removing the papers before connecting the rest of the squares.