Medallion Quilt: Hocus Pocus

Earlier this month I shared a post about the UFO Challenge I was participating in. The first number selected was "5" which was a Halloween medallion quilt that I wanted to make. I was inspired to make a medallion quilt by Gwen Marsten's book Liberated Medallion Quilts.

Here is the stack of fabric I started with. I didn't use all of these, but I did use many. Some of these I purchased and some were given to me.

I designed the quilt from the center out. I picked this large section of some Ghastlies fabric for my center and used the swoon block to really make it shine. I used Electric Quilt 7 (EQ7) to plan each border and round of the quilt.

I also used skills and tools I learned while making Bonnie Hunter's En Provence mystery quilt.

I tried to keep the piecing simple. This is where I learned about accuracy in a somewhat painful way. If you aren't getting perfectly sized seams and perfectly sized blocks then this kind of quilt isn't for you. I used the borders for each round to make sure everything was the right size.

I learned that busy fabrics don't always read the way you want them to. Example: the black and purple half-square triangle blocks in the row above are really just muddy.

Making sure you know the size of your piece after you added that last border is pretty important, too. The black and white striped border wasn't even supposed to be in this quilt. Mistakes happen. This one wasn't tragic, by any means. You will realize after you've cut the half-square triangle blocks that you could have just made four flying geese units instead.

This is the first time I made units like these. Split-quarter square blocks are what Google tells me they are called. They aren't difficult once you've made about a hundred quarter square triangle units.

The final round used flying geese, split 9-patch, 9-patch and single blocks to showcase some of the fabrics. The unfinished size with the final border is 72.5" by 72.5". Not too shabby.

I'll share the quilting in another post since this one seems to be so full of pictures.

Get It Done UFO Challenge hosted by Spring Water Designs.