I make one block at a time. I don't care for chain piecing. I'd rather have one finished item then many unfinished piled up.

I tend to do as you do. I just finished 30 blocks from an Eleanor Burns pattern and I had 120 parts that had 3 pieces of fabric= 240 pieces to sew. I sewed all of one side, trimmed and pressed, then pinned the other side, sewed, and pressed. Then I went to the next part. I also was working on other quilts and cutting out too.

It really depends on the pattern. I have learned that I do better giving myself reachable goals--like cut and piece 5 or 10 blocks--instead of doing all my cutting then all of piecing the individual units. I do have containers with 2 1/2 inch squares and HST's ready to go but they are for a couple of scrappy's and I cut and add to them on a random basis. I just finished the main components for a Swoon and since each block was a different colour, it made sense to do one block at a time.

PaperPrincess and I are on the same page. Paper Princess said, "

When making multiple unites of the same thing, I make one "practice" one first, since I can learn a lot from making that first quilt block or tote.

After that I usually lean towards mass production over one unit at a time. There's some limit, though. If I were making 100 totes, I wouldn't do each step for all 100 before moving on to the next step.

Sometimes I'll do all the cutting for a quilt at the beginning before sewing anything except the practice block, but sometimes it's more than I can stand to do and I move on before the cutting is done. The downside of not doing all the cutting for a quilt at the beginning is that I'll lose track of how much more I need to cut of each fabric. Then I'll end up with 46 blocks when I need 48 and have to pull out the fabrics and the cutter again. For some reason I really hate that, probably because I thought I was done when I wasn't!

I complete one stage for all the blocks in a quilt, and then move on to the next stage for all the blocks (this is after trying one complete sample block).

I do a mixture of approaches; I do chain piecing when I'm working on a project with lots of the same kind of piecing and I also alternate from cutting to piecing to pressing, not necessarily in that order. I think of the song from Music Man, 'Pick-a-Little' because it's how I think of my approach to sewing; cut-a-little, piece-a-little, press-a-little, piece, piece, piece - - -

Although I must qualify that by saying when I'm first starting on a project, I'll make up one block completely to 'audition' the fabrics and be sure I like how everything looks and adjust as needed.

With the projects I've worked on so far, I tend to cut everything at once (like you, I make large messes pulling out all the fabric). Then I usually start on the piece of a quilt that I'm most excited about, then finish the whole section(s). Then I usually work row to row (ie, the one I'm doing now has a complicated vertical strip, then like 12 rows of 4 blocks, so once I had the complicated vertical strop pieced, I've been doing each strip of rows in stages. Do the 4 blocks, attach the four blocks, move to the next row)

I jump around. I don't have the patience or discipline to finish one whole part. It's really frustrating with some recent more difficult patterns where they want you to cut out all the pieces before you even start. The frustrating part is I usually can't tell exactly which pieces go where on the pattern in case I want to swap out a different fabric.

My preference is to do two blocks at a time, building my quilt top. When doing Bonnie Hunter's mystery I will do as instructed, but I personally like to build and make sure things are coming together well rather than assembling all parts at the end. even with making a test block, I usually have some regrets - wishing I hadn't pressed all hst to the dark or something like that... Another reason I prefer to make blocks a couple at a time is that as they accumulate on the design wall I can tweak colors.