Putting The Pieces Together

My 'All Grayed Down' quilt (for lack of a better name right now) has been calling to me.  Slowly, one little block at a time, I've managed to get the separate pieces ready to start putting the puzzle pieces together.

A little bit of my 'All Grayed Down' quilt pieced together

 Although I had everything graphed out with areas on the paper shaded for lights, mediums and darks, things haven't been going exactly smoothly.  Do they ever?  I ended up tossing out 6 of my very lightest blocks.  What was I thinking?  I also rearranged the color pattern just a bit as it needed help.*wink  After hauling everything downstairs to the living room to lay things out and contemplate, upstairs to sew some more,  and then doing it all over again, I finally reached a place I could sew big chunks together.  Thank goodness.  The trail of threads was about to make me break out in hives.  Plus, it's so confusing trying to remember which blocks go where when they are anywhere from 2" strips to 10" blocks.  Again.  What was I thinking?

Ocean quilt I made over 10 years ago.

And now I remember why I haven't done this whole puzzle piece, little block/big block thing in over 10 years.  This Ocean quilt has one of my very first quilt blocks in it.  It took me over 3 years to put together as I was so extremely frustrated with the entire process.  I learned about coping strips, paper piecing, color values and all sorts of good little quilty things working on this particular quilt.  But it was a dreadfully painful process.

I still need to decide on an applique theme for the big cream chunks of fabric in the middle of my 'All Grayed Down' quilt, but that's for another day.  I still have more sewing to get finished up first.  And in case you're wondering, yes I am doing the applique blocks backward this time.  Usually they are the first done and then I sew my quilt around them.