I made more progess tonight and, most significantly, finally got down to wrestling the beast. What's in the picture is the easy part. The beasty part is currently resting quietly next to my sewing machine, building its energy up for our next round of battle, I'm sure.
Actually, at this stage, I have to say that I think I might actually be winning. But there's still a lot of punches the beast could make that could take me down, so I'm not quite crowing yet.
I do like the colors, though. You can't see them well in this picture because my design wall hangs in a particularly dark corner of my sewing room (not very handy for a design wall, sadly), and my camera broke right before the holidays so I have to make do with my cell phone. My cell actually takes pretty decent pictures--but not so much in bad lighting situations. So these colors are a little muddy. When it's actually done, I'll take a good picture. Maybe I'll own a camera again by then.
I do like paper-piecing. I just don't like having to figure out my own pattern.