V & A brown and red medallion quilt

After a break of nearly two years on this project, when the patchwork and fabrics were usually several hundred miles apart, it's about time I got the patchwork finished. The centre of my quilt is on the left and the original is on the right.  I resized some elements to make better use of modern precuts, like 5in charm squares, so the Flying Geese border is larger and has eleven rather than fourteen units on each side.  I used squares on point rather than the double diamonds in the fifth border too and added a solid 1in border inside the first nine patch on point border.

Initially, I wasn't going to make it as large as the original quilt at the V & A - 255 x 259cm (100 x 102in).  Now it looks like it is going to end up as my first king size bed quilt :-).  Once the second solid border is added, the quilt will measure 72in and 87 after the red zigzag border.  Resizing the second Flying Geese border to the same size as the first one (4in deep) adds another 8in, to 95in, and a second nine patch on point border adds 17in, making the total 112in before adding a plain outer border frame.  That's 4in wider than most wide quilt backings but not as wide as a king size wadding, so I won't need to seam that.

  

Both Flying Geese borders are made from only two fabrics in the original quilt, but I had already added more variety to the first one (see first photo), keeping the colours consistent but making each unit in a different fabric combination.  Maybe the second border should be all the same two fabrics?  I'm keeping to just two fabrics for the red zigzags.

V & A medallion inspired quilt - progress update

Another two borders added and a third made.

The slanted rectangles border is the one where I needed that extra fabric - the triangles on the end of the border strips are slightly larger than those along the sides.

The squares on point border suffered some kind of miscalculation and it ended up exactly half a unit short. The original quilt had a double diamond border at this point, but I wanted to simplify the design and make better use of charm squares (5in squares). The original also had those half square triangles at the ends. I thought I'd worked it out so I wouldn't have those, which might have worked if I'd left the charm squares as the full 5in, but I trimmed them to 4 1/2in so the finished squares are just 4in - I think I mixed up measurements for the diagonals across the squares between the finished and the cut measurements and did the same with the red triangles along the edge. This meant the whole border was slightly narrower than anticipated, so I added a 1in finished dark solid border right round, so the next border - nine patch blocks on point - will still fit. On the plus side, the solid border helps to control the bias edges on those red triangles (when I remake this in Moda's 'Authentic', I'll cut them so they are on the straight grain).

Quilt panel twin

I thought I'd seen the panel I used in the centre of my medallion squares patchwork somewhere before - it's a reproduction of the centre of the Fife Coverlet in the Quilt Museum's collection at York.