Jigsaw Puzzle Quilting

My son requested a pirate quilt, and drew up a lovely sketch that included a large jolly roger, with a big pirate ship beneath it. I figured I could only do the ship with appliqué or paper piecing, and I thought paper piecing would probably look a lot nicer. I scoured the internets and was fortunate to find a free ship pattern from the Piece By Number website

It was a six inch block, which I needed to be a lot larger, so, fortunately, I was able to select the "poster" option on my printer which printed the single page PDF pattern onto sixteen pages, for a finished size of 24". I cut it out, and felt a little intimidated.

I then stayed up much too late on Friday night (yes, my life is super exciting, don't be jealous!) putting this together:

I still have to add the water at the bottom, which will be done the same way as the sky, which is apparently called strata technique - I used curved improv piecing the make the block, and then chopped it up for the paper pieced sections.

I am so pleased with how it has turned out so far, it looks exactly like I pictured it when he first drew his little sketch. The paper piecing, which I worried would be too hard, actually made getting all those precise shapes really easy, and it totally appealed to my geeky jigsaw puzzle loving side.

Now, I just have to finish the sea, and then figure out how to paper piece a jolly roger!

Thanks for visiting!