I have been wanting to make or design (and make) a medallion quilt for a little while now. I had been playing around with designs and finally settled on the design below and decided I would sew up a top at my April 2023 Quiltn' Sisters retreat. I debated about how I would use color in the quilt, and settled on the idea of not using any color at all. Instead, I used two Michael Miller solid fabrics: black and charcoal. I love how soft Michael Miller solids are. So is this a medallion quilt? I'm not sure. It's more like a quilt with four quadrants or blocks with some flying geese sashing. Whatever you want to call it, it is unlike other quilts that I've made or designed before. When trying to photograph the quilt, I realized just how thin those soft Michael Miller fabrics were! For that reason, I decided to use black batting for the first time. The batting I used was Quilter's Dream Poly Select Midnight Batting and is a little thicker than the Warm & Natural batting that I am used to using in quilts. I had the quilt quilted by my long-arm quilter with the Dizzy Lizzy pattern that I've used a couple of times in the past (you can see one here and here and here). I love the texture (visual & physical) that it adds to a quilt. I bound the quilt in "Plum" from Michael Miller. Just a little bit of color in this quilt. The quilt finishes around 66" x 66". Thanks for stopping by!
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I recently posted a picture on Instagram of a baby quilt that I finished. I like to use a hashtag to keep track of quilts that I made each year. This year it's #handmademyrth2023. For fun I took a look at my hashtag and was slightly shocked to see that there were only 4 finished quilts that I've shared this year (and 2 were only baby quilts). But then I remembered that I have 2 quilts that I hadn't shared. Why? Because back in May when this quilt was finished I decided to write a tutorial for it. Finishing that tutorial (and posting the quilt) has been on my list of things to do for 5 months. And today I sat down and finished it! You can find it here. This quilt came to be because I wanted to use up more of my Kona cotton solid fatquarters that I got as part of a subscription a few years ago. I pulled this pile of FQ from a couple of different bundles. You can find a list of the colors in the tutorial. Below you can see the rough idea that I drafted in EQ8 to get an idea of yardage & number of blocks needed. Looking back through photos, looks like I started and finished this guy back in February 2023! I backed this quilt in Minky Luxe which has a 12mm pile and makes for a super silky quilt. My long arm-quilter quilted it for me with a design called "River Run #3" from Urban Elementz. Here you can see the difference between regular minky (3mm pile) in black and the Minky luxe (12mm) in white that I used. A new tutorial has been added to my website to help those who are interested in making a similar quilt. You can find it here. The tutorial has all of the quilt details.
Special note regarding my tutorials: Some people ask why I post free tutorials and patterns, and the answer is that I do it for many reasons. 1. Because I find it to be a good mental challenge to teach myself to do the things involved in writing a tutorial. It takes website design skills, along with quilt math, and some graphic design skills (to make the diagrams). 2. I like having my tutorials as a reference for future quilt projects. I have sometimes gone back to see how I made a quilt when I want to remake it. 3. I don't feel that the things I'm posting are super complicated, original or unique. Therefore I don't believe that they should be sold. Now I realize that this is controversial, but this is how I feel . I don't believe that it is right for people to sell "patterns" for traditional blocks that have been around for years. I understand that it take my time to put them down in works and diagrams, but as I said above, I like the challenge. Thanks for stopping by! |
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