Swirling Medallion Baby Quilt for the Blogger's Quilt Festival

Let me introduce you to my Swirling Medallion Quilt, my entry into the baby quilt category of the Blogger's Quilt Festival.

If you are a new visitor to my blog from the festival, welcome and I hope you will take a minute to look around. Thank you to Amy from Amy's Creative Side for hosting the festival.

Swirling Medallion is about 42" square. She was made following the Swirling Medallion Quilt pattern in Quilting Modern, which is a book by Jacquie Gehring and Katie Pederson, although I adapted the patter by adding some extra rounds . I first introduced this quilt in this blog post where you can read more about her construction.



For this Blogger's Quilt Festival post, I though I would share a bit about the inspiration to make this fun little quilt. I had bought a bundle of Heather Ross's Briar Rose line of fabrics with no plan at all for them.



I carried them off to the coast for my summer vacation. While I was walking the beach with my dog, I kept looking at the ripples in the ocean caused by tossing in stones and by bigger rocks sticking out of the water.



I had brought my copy of Quilting Modern with me on vacation as I wanted to work on some improv projects. So the swirling medallion pattern, the bright Briar Rose prints and the ocean ripples all came together and I made this quilt. The quilting is also a diamond swirl out from the centre, slightly off kilter and not perfectly evenly spaced, in the modern industrial style I like.



This picture above is before washing. As always, for me the texture added from washing completes the design. And it adds even more beachy references for me: waves, sand, driftwood, eroded rocks and cliffs, and the original swirls that form when you toss a rock into the ocean.



For the back I used a Kona yellow - I am not sure which one - and some more Briar Rose. I machine stitched the binding using the method my friend Marianne from The Quilting Edge patiently explained to me over a couple of lunches - she also has a tutorial here.



There are not really strawberries at my beach but the blackberries grow in abundance. So this quilt is yet another of my quilts inspired by the ocean and the beach, despite its lack of beach colours and the wrong kind of berries. Hakuna matata, it was made on my island, it is full of fun and movement, summer sun and smiles, swirls and texture - clearly it is about the beach.



I hope you enjoy this quilt and all the others at the Blogger's Quilt Festival.

Quilt Stats:

Name: Swirling Medallion
Pattern: Swirling Medallion from Quilting Modern
Size: 42" x 42"
Fabrics: Kona Snow and Briar Rose, with a Kona yellow (not sure which one) on the back
Festival Category: Baby Quilts

You have time to enter up to two quilts in the festival if you have not yet done so - go here to see all the categories - and there are some quality hours to be spent pursuing the entries, they are fantastic.

Best,

Leanne

ps, The Amazon links in this post are affiliated Amazon links.