Medallion Quilt Along

The Modern Irish Quilters are having a Quilt-A-Long.  It is for a Medallion quilt and there are two choices.  Follow along building borders around a central panel of 15", like a star or a paper pieced centre, or do your own thing, following guidelines from Catbird Quilt Studio's series on how to make a Medallion Quilt.

I have ideas for both and I'm really intrigued by the design hints on both streams. The centre panel should be 1/4 to 1/3 the size of the quilt and there are hints for framing the surrounds and adding borders.  I am hoping to learn a lot!  The idea that is buzzing around my head the most is this one for a baby quilt with a centre panel made using hexagons; Something like this:

It came from playing with hexagon shapes in Microsoft Word and I ended up with a brightly coloured balloon. 
The sun and the grass came from the Craftsy 2012 BOM with Amy Gibson.  Her Block "Sunny with a chance of Hex" was used to teach Paper piecing Hexagons and she challenged us to make our own version and that's were the bees and flowers came from.   The ideas from these blocks stayed with me so adding the balloon seemed like a good idea and to add a curve to the grass and then to fill the space with a kite and some clouds maybe.

Playing with borders is giving me this so far, though it will probably change as I make it.

 

I want my centre panel to be rectangular not square and to fit all of the hexagon designs I'm going to make it 18" by 24".  To make the balloon and flowers etc I've had to learn a little about the geometry of Hexagons.  If you have no interest in Maths you can skip this bit!

You can print templates for Hexies from Incompetech and they look like this:

You enter the length of the side you want and it calculates the rest and gives you the template to cut the hexies to the correct size.

For the balloon above I wanted it to be about 5" high and there are 5 hexies stacked to make the balloon at it's highest point, so I need my individual hexies to be 1" high.

The height is the square root of 3 multiplied by s.  The square root of 3 is 1.732 (1.732 x1.732=3) so if I want a 1" height I need to divide 1 by 1.732 to get s which is 0.58".  Putting 0.58 into the website gives me this template.

I have a 5" high balloon and it will be  just under 6" across.  (W=2x0.58 which is 1.16 and there are 5 hexies so 5 x 1.16 is 5.8")

So I now have 5 templates printed for the 5 different sizes I need (balloon, flower, bee, sun, clouds).  I'll worry about the kite next week!

So for the rest of the week, I'll be busy cutting up the templates and stitching tiny hexagons together!

And for the original idea of a star centrepiece in case you are interested this is the Mosaic of favourites I found on flickr.  I am hoping for some border inspiration from these gorgeous quilts.

1. Swirling Medallion quilt top - side view, 2. Marcelle Medallion - advice please, I'm stuck, 3. Border 8, 4. Modern Medallion Top, 5. FO: Marcelle Medallion, 6. Mystery Medallion Quilt - Border 3, 7. Baisakhi Medallion Quilt, 8. Medallion Quilt detail, 9. Medallion Quilt detail, 10. Medallion Quilts on Craftsy, 11. Medallion Border #6, 12. My Quilt  

Linking up to Modern Quilt Guild of Ireland and