I released a new quilt pattern this week! Hooray! It's called the Minimal Medallion Quilt.
This was a quilt I originally made and donated to my friend Teresa's charity Fish Fry. She puts it on every year to honor her late husband and raise money for a local high school.
When I designed this quilt last year, I was thinking that I had never made a medallion style quilt before. So I looked at lots of different medallion quilts to get ideas. You know, the kind with one large center block and then lots of different borders surrounding it? As I looked a the quilts, I realized that the reason I had never made a medallion quilt is that I don't really love the randomness of the borders- or the look of lots of borders in general. Not cohesive enough for me, haha. I decided to just use the concept- starting in the center of the quilt, and building the design out to the edges. So that's what I did. It ended up being one big main block with one big pieced border around it.
Another consideration when designing it was that I had a coordinating charm pack and jelly roll that I wanted to use, so I made all the colored pieces from 2 1/2" wide strips or 5" squares. In the end I changed the color scheme and just used solid yardage from my stash, but I think it made it easier to come up with the design with those size parameters in mind. The way the pattern is written, it actually works best to use fat quarters and fat eighths or yardage, rather than the smaller precuts.
I backed the quilt with a medium gray solid, quilted it using the pantograph "Raindrops on Water" by Three Sisters Fabric, and bound it in a matching charcoal solid.
It only took me one month to come up with the initial design, figure out all the piecing, and make the quilt. Somehow, it took almost a year to write the pattern. It was more complex than any pattern I have written before so it has a LOT of illustrations. But I think it was worth it in the end! I had some fabulous pattern testers and I've included a couple of their quilts below so you can see the many possibilities of fabric choices for this pattern!
This is Becky's quilt (beckys_handmades on Instagram).
She used darling coordinating prints.
This quilt was made by Chris (thecolorfulom on Instagram).
Absolutely fabulous use of color on this quilt. The purple background fabric is so great!
This is Lynn's quilt (lynncycle on Instagram).
This darker background really makes the colored fabrics pop! Fabulous color scheme on this one too!
Here are a few other details about the pattern:
•Finished size: 63" x 63"
•Skill Level is Intermediate
•Includes full color illustrations and a coloring sheet
•It's Fat Quarter friendly
•It's available as a PDF or a Paper pattern
•It's a FUN quilt to make (according to my pattern testers)!
Want to make your own? It's available now in my shop!
Thanks for reading!❤