The absolute most fun, with no rules and no size restrictions on fabric pieces is to design a quilt on your wall. You start by collecting a bunch of smallish pieces of fabric in the colors you want and then just plop them on the flannel wall, organizing and reorganizing to get the colors sorted out. This initial placing of pieces may have them overlapping…it is an artistic exercise with the hard work of making it all fit together coming later.
Once you have the basic color flow, you go back over smaller sections and trim pieces to get the right size pieces,
figuring out how to put them together in a logical way. Often I do sections of 6-10 pieces which become a rectangle block, never the SAME size blocks because I don’t want there to be patterns in the piecing. I often find I’m adding more fabrics, sometimes a narrow strip to expand a color direction, or maybe when the reality of how to sew it together is examined I find I need some more pieces to make the technical construction work better. You can do anything you want! There are no patterns, no rules, and it is only your eye for the colors that drives your decisions on what stays, what is removed and what is added to make it all work better. There is a lot more variability in piece size with this approach to mosaic quilts.
I’ve used this approach for my MULTI MOSAIC design series which includes a lot of different colors and for more limited color palates like the BLUE GREEN TEAL MOSAIC design shown here. I do not concern myself with making each piece of fabric a shape which has four 90 degree corners. Pieces might be slightly angled as I’m not overly concerned with straight lines and true squares and rectangles. I like the effect of piecing with variability.
When sorting out the piecing in sections and then the sections within the whole quilt, I keep an eye on where the sewing lines are. I try to avoid those top to bottom or side to side sewing lines by breaking up how the pieces go together.