I've officially started hand quilting my medallion quilt. I had toyed with a few different ways of quilting this quilt – maybe following seam lines at random, or just stitching giant concentric circles to break up the angled nature of the quilt. Nothing really seemed right. The one thing I did know for sure from piecing, is the true power of the corner squares on this quilt. They're like keystones holding everything together, so I knew that my quilting really needed to respect and accentuate that. I also wanted to be sure that the back of this quilt was as beautiful as the front, and want to figure out some way to reference the construction of the front on the back. That idea alone is the main reason I opted against concentric circles and random "stitching in the ditch" (stitches that hide right in the seams of the pieces).
I've resolved to do a few things. Firstly, I'm stitching the medallions with bright red thread. Some stitched in the ditch, others with complementing stitch lines. Secondly I'll be changing my thread color throughout each row of the medallion so there is some reference to the lovely dynamic rows of piecing. It also solves the problem of just what color thread to use, which was quite the dilemma in its own right. I stitched the medallion with a combination of stitching in the ditch for puffiness and some evenly spaced linework on the background. The most exciting thing so far is starting right back at the beginning again, and experiencing working on each little layer of this quilt a second time around.
