Precision Piecing my Scrap Country Chain and Knot Quilt

I got lots of quilting done this weekend - highly productive. I have renamed the "*Ugly* Brown Quilt" to "Scrap Country Chain and Knot Quilt" because it's not going to be ugly after all; in fact, it's turning out quite nicely. What a relief!. I really like the chain and knot pattern, even though each block has 40 separate pieces. I'm making a 4x5 quilt, so that's a total of 800 pieces for just the blocks. I'm also sashing it with cornerstones, for another 79 pieces.

I got this far on Friday. Hardly any of the tan fabric was sewn to any of the mini 4 patches (top row). The red/tan and green/tan blocks were easy since they could be strip pieced, but the minis and the large patch (center bottom) had to be done in onsies and twosies depending on the size of the donated fabric. I kept the tan fabric in strips for sewing and cut them apart afterwards. I'm always trying to improve my piecing accuracy and this helps a *lot*. I use the same technique for sashing blocks, then I can trim and square the sash/block at the same time.

This was really a terrific pattern for using up lots of disparate (OK, kinda ugly) bits of fabric. In fact, it uses up 13 different donated fabrics - remember the ones that had to be Febreezed outdoors because of their odor? The coordinating tan fabric is actually a Christmas fabric (who knew?) that I got at the Christmas Goose in Las Vegas. I brought all my little bits with me and picked the one that fought the least. lol The dark red and green fabrics that comprise the chains are Hobby Lobby standards.

I decided the easiest way to piece this block was to create the chunks for a standard nine patch, which I got done today. They are displayed in their proper places above. This means I'm down to about 180 pieces from 800 for just the blocks. It's actually starting to look doable! Also I used the Precision Piecing pinning techniques to align my blocks and all of them turned out deadly accurate, which was very nice on such a large project.