Modern Medallion Quilt along (1)

Wow!  Two posts in one day after such a long time...must be feeling productive. :)  Possibly because the young man is now at an age where he is enjoying going off to play lego or draw for extended lengths of time and so my sewing machine and I are able to become reacquainted during daylight hours (when I am less likely to make a huge mess of something...)

Anyway, I digress.  This is, in fact, the first post of my progress in making my first medallion quilt.  I have the makings of possibly a second one in my work in progress container and so this seemed a good opportunity to try one on for size before committing to that layout for my improv blocks.  The quilt I am doing is also a huge skills builder - bonus!  If you are interested this is the quilt pattern in question.

So the story so far...First step after commitment and joining the Facebook quilt along page, was to choose my fabrics.  I wanted to challenge myself to only use stash.  Of course, it isn't such a challenge when you have *quite* a bit of fabric. *ahem*  Anyway, here was my selection:

 I had started out wanting to use green tones and make a fairly monochromatic quilt with low volume background and pops of green.  The greens needed something else so I widened the range to include those blue/greens on the left.  Still needed something...Orange!  Happy with my selection I printed off the pattern and...panicked.

The central focus of the quilt is a modern, wonky version of a New York Beauty block, renamed the New York Beauty Contest.  It involves freestyle cutting (yay!), curves (mmm, ok...) and foundation (paper) piecing (oh no!)

I am not a paper piecer.  I have done the grand total of one block of paper piecing which was under strict supervision and guidance at a retreat.  Every tutorial you read on the topic (including the one kindly written for this stage of the medallion quilt) says something like "Here are some pictures of me paper piecing and some very useful instructions but basically, it all sees rather weird, hard and counter intuitive until you do it for yourself and then it's fine, really so you just have to sit down and do it."  It is indeed all of those things.  It involves sewing on the wrong side of the foundation with the fabrics right sides together and then flipping them backwards to cover a void and somehow, just somehow, it works.  I am just glad that precision wasn't the aim here and that I could at least relax into my inaccuracies.

So here it is, stage 1, the central medallion - the New York Beauty Contest.