
Look! She lives! Not only does she live but she has stuff to share!!! So, yes…I have been sorely neglecting the old blog for the quick and ease of Instagram (ie I’m lazy). Well, not entirely lazy, but it is certainly easier to shoot a photo on my phone, upload it to IG and then boom, done. As Max said on Two Broke Girls, “Twitter is stupid and Instagram is Twitter for people who can’t read.” (FYI you can follow me on both Twitter and Instagram – ha). Anywho…back to the pretty pictures. So, I have tons of stuff to share – some of it is stuff you may have seen on IG and some of it I actually got out my camera and edited in Lightroom and all that fancy stuff. For today, well…the square format is a dead giveaway, no?
So, back in October or so I decided that I wanted to jump on the Marcelle Medallion bandwagon. Alexia Abegg’s book Liberty Love includes the pattern for the quilt. I spent a ton of time surfing around the internet looking at other people’s Marcelles and trying to decide what fabrics I wanted to use on mine. In the end, what it came down to was that I wanted it to be a collection of some of my favorite fabrics and designers, and I was going to basically wing it and hope it all comes together in the end. I knew right from the start I wanted to include some of that Kaffe Fassett Jupiter fabric. I played around with a number of things to pair it with, but in the end another Kaffe print won out – the red Aboriginal Dot.
You can probably tell from my photo too that I decided to do the center block by English Paper Piecing it. I was scared stiff of trying to match up those sharp points and y-seams. So, I made my own EPP templates and got started.
At Thanksgiving I had finished up the next round on the center block using Tula Pink Parisville French Lace and Lizzie House Pearl Bracelet. Yellow is probably my absolute favorite color, and I really wanted to use this lemony shade in my Marcelle.

At this point, I ran into issues. I don’t know if my templates were off just enough and compounded they were making my measurements way off, but by the time I went to add on the next round of pieces I could not get my pieces to fit together correctly and match up. After getting most of them sewn together by hand, I knew that it was going to have to come out. So, I ripped out everything back to the yellow and ended up sewing it on my machine. I still had some issues, as you can see (although the poor quality of this photo may hide some of that). But, I was ok with leaving it as is. The important thing to me was that the center points were matched, so I could live with the rest.

And for finishing out the center block, my center was so bright and bold I wanted to tone it down a little bit with some cooler colors. I went with Lush Uptown with the fabulous paint by number print that picked up my yellow and red a bit. Then I complimented that with one of the low volume prints from the Architextures line. Finally, for the outer corners I needed something to ground my block – so I went with a navy print from Anna Maria Horner’s Hand Drawn Garden line. It also picked up my reds and yellows, adding in some bright greens and turquoises too. I am pretty much just auditioning fabrics as I go and choosing things I really like, which is kind of fun. May be a hot mess later, but so far I’m loving it.
After struggling to get that center block sewn, I was faced with my first border. After trying several different things I knew that I had so many prints going on that I really wanted some kind of tone on tone print for the main fabric in the border. I saw someone’s Marcelle that used one of the Tula Pink Acacia prints in a bright chartreuse that looked fabulous, so I ordered some of that, thinking that it would tie in that bright green in the AMH corner fabrics. I also ordered the same print in the purple color. Once my fabrics came in I got to work auditioning. I actually ended up bringing my sewing machine into the living room and sewing on the coffee table while I watched the movie Juno (which I really enjoyed).

After much deliberation, I ended up not using the chartreuse Acacia print. It worked, but the purple actually was better. So, purple it was. And after trying a TON of different things for the cornerstones, I ended up with this bright turquoise Lily Ashbury fabric from Gypsy Wife.

It is crazy bright and super colorful, but I really love it. The purple just worked. It picked up the centers of those flowers in the AMH fabric, and played off the purple in the Jupiter print in the star. The cornerstones also worked with the AMH fabric, so it seemed a match made in heaven.
Now…what the heck to use for my next border. It’s a border of 60 degree triangles and I’m completely stumped. I’m going to have to spend some time auditioning things to see what works. I’ve been collecting some fabrics here and there that I love, so I have some good options. Where I find I’m seriously lacking is in the low volume fabrics. I picked some more up a month ago though, so I have a few more choices now.
I’m enjoying the journey of just kind of seeing where this takes me and what works and what doesn’t.
I’m grateful for summertime projects.
I’ve enjoyed seeing bits of your medallion quilt on IG and loved hearing about your thought process/fabric choices here! It’s looking wonderful!
I’ve enjoyed seeing bits of your medallion quilt on IG and loved hearing about your thought process/fabric choices here! It’s looking wonderful!
I love, love, love the bright colors and different fabrics! I never realized there were so many choices to make in creating a quilt. Beautiful work!
I love, love, love the bright colors and different fabrics! I never realized there were so many choices to make in creating a quilt. Beautiful work!