Medallion Quilt–Japanese Linen

Meet our newest addition to our home! After a long string of quilting for others, I relished spending time on us!

This monster’s 93″x98″ with a total of ~1200 pieces of fabric. It’s a 6×7 grid of medallions.

Relatively simple straight-line quilting, with varied angles at the pattern change.

The Making Of

For those interested in the process, read on.

Fabric: Folk Modern linen from Kokka and others from Echino (check out Harts Fabric)
Pattern: Metro Medallion
Batting: Quilter’s Dream Wool
Adhesive: Odif 505 fabric

Piecing

This was the first quilt I’ve done with curves, and it’s really not all that bad! I used the Quick Curve Ruler from sewkindofwonderful.com. Her tutorials are great. The curves are slight enough that it’s not a hassle to feed through the machine, and the seams lay pretty flat.

Piecing the rows together.

Piecing the back was a lot harder than I imagined. I’m a bit more anile than I need to be with placement, and even after that, figuring out how to piece together without partial seams was like playing tetris (or maybe tangrams).

Making the sandwich

After the exhilaration of finishing piecing the top and back, there’s a moment of oh…shit. Making the sandwich entails affixing the front, batting, and back together so it’s ready for quilting.

I use Odif 505 temporary fabric spray to make the sandwich. The alternative is to use hundreds of safety pins, which is a royal pain in the ass when you need to quilt and pull those pins out one by one. Trust me, it’s worth the can of spray adhesive.

Lay your quilt top (or bottom) flat on the ground, then put your batting on top. I did the top first, and since it’s the side that’s fixed and perfect in size, make sure the batting goes over each edge by ~3″.

Lay the backing on top. The bottom should be about the same size as the batting, about 3″ extra on each side.

Roll down the backing in ~12-16″ sections to expose the batting. I roll down to the center as pictured. Spray the batting with the 505 spray in 12-16″ sections and roll the backing back down over the sprayed section, firmly pressing and making sure there’s no wrinkles. Once you’ve done that half, repeat from the other side to the center.

When the backing-to-batting is done, repeat for the batting-to-front.

Trim excess, leaving a few inches on the edges.

The Quilting

I love designing quilting. It’s a subtle addition to a quilt that can completely change its feel, and doesn’t hit you in the face. My favorite quilts are those that you see the major piecing design, then on second look notice the quilting. It’s like a treasure hunt!

For this quilt, I had a couple requirements. First, the quilting had to be really simple since the top piecing was already busy, and more practically, I didn’t know if the quilt would fit into my machine. Second requirement, I wanted to help differentiate the color variation in the 4th and 5th rows, which didn’t turn out as contrast-y as I thought it would’ve. My final design:

I had a few moments of fear wondering if the quilt would fit in my machine. Thank goodness it was only straight stitching. I used a dual feed walking foot to help, but the stitches were still varied in length and wobbly in places.

I should mention that this time I used a water soluble marker and yardstick to measure out the lines. Normally I don’t mark anything for quilting.

The binding. Simple 4 colors. I didn’t make any effort to line up the colors with corners.