Eri

I've just designed a quilt and am trying to figure out how to piece the squares with a minimal number of cuts--I'd like to keep the pieces as large as possible so as not to disrupt the patterns too much. I'm hoping that perhaps someone who has done this before or who has more creative piecing experience than I have will have some suggestions.

The first square, an 8-inch square [Photoshopped image attached] has an on-point square within a 4-inch square. I'd like to keep the on-point square as a single piece of fabric as the print is a large one. That part isn't so hard. The next part, though, I'm not sure how to do. The 4-inch square is surrounded by strips which are 6 inches long (finished). I can figure out how to attach all of them except one in the full 6-inch length... I can't figure out how to start with anything but a 4-inch strip along the first side of the 4-inch square. That leaves me with a single 2-inch square of the first fabric at the end that I have to attach to the fourth strip to make it an 8-inch strip. Is there a way to force this to work?

The second square is 12 inches and is more complex [Photoshopped image attached]. It consists of the same on-point square from the 8-inch block but only two corners are "squared off" with the second fabric. The other two are surrounded by angled pieces. I was thinking that I would use tube piecing to create a 6-inch square consisting of the grass fabric, the outer diagonal, the inner diagonal, and a quarter of the on-point square but I *really* don't want to cut up that on-point square. :-/ The only other alternative I can think of is to split each of the diagonals into 3 or more pieces and I'd rather not do that, either.

If it helps envision what I'm trying to do, I've also attached a scan of my crayon drawing of the whole quilt... my husband claims my colored pencils are buried somewhere in my sewing room but I was in a rush to leave the house that day, so I was reduced to taking along my 7-year-old's dull crayons. :P The little blocks along the sides show how I was originally planning to piece the outer sections.. but they involve cutting some of the dark purple squares, which I'm trying to avoid. Each square represents 2 inches. The background, which looks white in the scan, is the grass fabric shown in the 12-inch block.

Is this something I can accomplish with paper piecing? I just paper-pieced for the first time last week, so I'm a complete newbie to the concept and still have trouble getting it right! If not paper piecing, does anyone have any other suggestions?