Day: August 20, 2017

Medallion Quilt II – Update

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Melanie McNeil commented: And of course you can shift them farther apart, too. This is exciting!

Here’s what that would look like (not necessarily using the lighter blue fabric – I have other choices):

Quadrants Separated

Doing that would overcome an interesting problem with the medallion itself – it’s not symmetrical – it’s 23 7/8″ in one direction, 23″ in the other. I can’t trim it much further to even it out – it’s printed slightly elongated in width. I might be able to fudge it better if I were to cut it out along the outer circle, and appliqué it onto a square piece of fabric. But were I to cut it, bringing the dark to the center and adding sashing to separate the blocks, I can trim the resulting block precisely and the bit’s of the medallion I lose in that trimming wouldn’t be noticeable…

Medallion Trimmed

This whole process is so interesting! That’s it for today. I have other things to do. This quilt is going to take a lot of “pondering”. People ask me how long it takes to make one – how can I possibly calculate the creative thinking time?

Medallion Quilt

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“Medallion quilts have a central area that dominates the overall design. Other design elements are added around the center, increasing the quilt’s size as new ‘rows’ are added around the center.”

The center in a medallion quilt is usually pieced, occasionally it begins with a single largish printed element. In this case I have a 24″ printed medallion – a Northcott Stonehenge Medici fabric panel which I bought a couple of years ago along with 1/2m of each of the accompanying fabrics. I thought it might make a nice medallion quilt with the fabric doing most of the work. Well, it will, but the question is do I want to use this medallion at all, or should I do a pieced quilt using the fabrics from the Stonehenge Medici collection building a central motif from scratch?

Northcott Stonhenge Medici Panel

Northcott Stonehenge Medici Fabrics

At the moment the fabrics are sitting on the cutting table as I think about how to proceed. For example, I could do something like the medallion quilt below by Borderline Quilter:

Medallion Quilt by Borderline Quilter

The problem is I’m sure my boredom threshold would quickly be reached attempting all the beautiful but finicky piecing that Kay Bell has done. I can see me building squares within squares, flying geese, half-square triangles, etc. but not tiny ones. What I particularly like about the quilt above are the blocks which create the illusion of the on-point border as background. My fabrics already have an element for a wide outer border (which I used in a previous quilt):

Garden Trellis with Wide Print Border

and will use again here. For now, I will probably go to Melanie McNeil’s Medallion Quilt Lessons to help me think about what I might do with my fabrics.