A Work In Progress: Medallion Quilt Challenge

I've blogged a couple of times about the medallion quilt challenge members of my quilt guild are working on this year, but it has been awhile so I thought I'd catch y'all up on my progress. {insert cheesy grin here} I'm so excited with the direction this quilt is going that I just have to share. Warning: photo overload ahead!

As you may remember if you've stopped by before, we started out the year with the instruction to make a center block.

From there, each month a new block or technique is drawn from a bag for the next instruction. The rounds to date have been drawn in the following order:

• February - Applique
• March - Rail Fence
• April - Flying Geese
• May - Wild Card (we could choose whatever we wanted to do)
• June - Pinwheels

And since I'm behind and trying to catch up, the next two rounds that have been drawn are:

• July - 4-patch
• August - Piano Keys

I've tried to challenge myself each round. For our center square, I made a paper pieced star from the book "50 Fabulous Paper-Pieced Stars" by Carol Doak. I've done a little paper piecing, but not much, so I enjoyed taking on a larger project. As for applique, I enlarged the flowers in one of the pieces of fabric in the Antique Fair collection by Blackbird Designs that I'm using and used that for my applique.

For the rail fence, I found a ribbon border that used the rail fence block to create it, which was a challenge to figure out the math to make it fit. I shared a tutorial on how to make the Rail Fence Ribbon Border here.

Then I decided to place my center on point and make the setting triangles with the flying geese blocks. Talk about a math challenge! I ended up taking the corners off after this picture and trimming them up a little to take out some of the waviness.

Luckily, the wild card was drawn next which allowed me to cut odd width strips to make my square a size divisible by 4 so that my next round of 4" pinwheels fit. To dress up that plain border, I added prairie points.

And, for those pinwheels, I found a 3-D pinwheel pattern for a little variation from the standard pinwheel.

I'm anxious to finish up the pinwheel border and move to the 4-patch & piano key borders because I've got something planned that I think will really set this quilt off. Can't wait to share more pictures at that point so you'll have to keep checking back! {wink, wink}

Our quilt guild is starting to talk about what next year's challenge will be. Do you belong to a guild? Do you have challenges? Please share your favorite quilt challenges for ideas!

~Sharla

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