Marcelle Medallion {Blogger's Quilt Festival}

My regular readers have been inundated with photos of this quilt during it's construction - so apologies for bombarding you once again! I've decided to enter my Marcelle Medallion into the Blogger's Quilt Festival though :o)

I began making this quilt as part of the Marcelle Medallion QAL at the beginning of September this year, hosted by Penny Poppleton (which is actually still running, I just got a bit obsessed with this quilt!). The pattern for this quilt is from Liberty Love by Alexia Abegg - a really beautiful book. It took me almost exactly a month from start to finish - you can read a lot more about it here.

I learnt so, so much while making this quilt and really enjoyed all the different types of piecing in the quilt top. It is a pretty challenging quilt, and I really enjoyed building my piecing skills, using several techniques I haven't tried before.

The palette I used was inspired by one of the Summer Totem fabrics designed by Anna Maria Horner. I used well over 200 different fabrics in the end.

I had a lot of fun with the quilting. I quilted each border slightly differently, but tried to make the piecing the star. I generally just quilted the background fabrics and left the coloured sections unquilted. As a result, they pop up from the background.

For the first and third borders, I used the fabric as inspiration for my quilting and followed the pattern in the fabric (triple stitched lines in the first border, and quilting both sides of the black lines in the third border.)

For the first time I used a wool/cotton blend batting - and I really love the extra loft it's given this quilt. I've noticed that even after washing, the quilting has remained very similar to what it was like beforehand. It hasn't seemed to shrink nearly as much as my usual bamboo batting.

I've decided to enter my quilt into the wall hanging category - it has finished up at about 59" square, and is destined to be hung in our house once I get around to making a hanging sleeve!

Quilt Stats:
Pattern: Marcelle Medallion by Alexia Abegg
Size: 59" square
Quilted: by myself on my Bernina QE440
Fabric: countless fabrics from my stash, based on Summer Totem by Anna Maria Horner.

I hope you enjoy the rest of the festival! I know I will.

xx Jess