“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.
jmn 
Wow. That’s pretty cool. I would have a hard time passing up the chance to use the printed panel as a center. You could reimagine it, I guess, by cutting it into sections and inserting something else, pieced or not, to change the look. (Not sure I would, but it’s a thought!) One thing I’ve found is that small-scale piecing rarely works well for me. The types of blocks you’ve named, “squares within squares, flying geese, half-square triangles, etc.” do almost all the work. Also plain squares as bigger alternate blocks, or squares as 4-patches and 9-patches and other checkerboards. Almost all my piecing is pretty simple and doable. Thanks for the link and shout-out.
First thing I’m going to do is take a photo of the medallion, print it, cut it out as is, then try cutting the image into quarters – I’m wondering what it would look like with the center in the corners, for example. Also, in the end, how I quilt it will make a huge difference. I’m thinking “free motioning” the outlines of the design elements might work will giving a kind of “trapunto” effect.
Yes, great idea. No harm in playing with pictures! 🙂
Also (and likely you’ve already thought this) make sure you turn those squares/segments each direction, as they’ll give different looks that way.