WIP Wednesday: The purple medallion

It's bee a couple of weeks since I posted about my quilting projects.  While at my mom's I made quite a bit of headway on the remaining steps for my big dragon quilt (last seen here) including blocking it/soaking it/getting rid of the running color/markings, and now I have even got the facing on.  I'm working on some final beading now, and hopefully will have final pictures for you guys soon showing all the quilting and details.

But today, I wanted to show the quilt that's been in my UFO stack the very longest!  I drafted the pattern and pieced this purple medallion over three years ago (ouch!) after seeing this cool book.  It's a pattern often seen in quilting and also cathedral floors, and I was really intrigued.  It was fun to figure out how to draft the pieces.  I paper pieced the medallion part (it's about 48" in diameter) and then it sat in my closet for a year or so.

Sometime thereafter, I set it into a large block, but hemmed and hawed forever about how to finish it.  I settled on putting a bunch of different purple-on-purple pieced blocks on 2 sides and then adding several borders.   Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I got it on my Mom's Innova longarm (which is pretty much awesome).  I haven't gotten very far on the quilting, I spent most of the weekend doing wretched stitch-in-the-ditch.  Most of that turned out horrible, but I was able to start some leafy filler in the borders, and over the Christmas holiday I hope to finish the rest of the quilting.  The piecing isn't too great, mostly because it was one of my very first tops to piece, but I'm excited to being getting it done, especially since I really really love the [bright] colors!

Here are a couple of pictures of it on the longarm, sorry I didn't take any before I loaded it!  (the really terrible navy in the white border is just stabilizing stitch, my stitch-in-the-ditch isn't that bad although you can see some serious bobbles).

I hope you guys are making good progress on some things at least that aren't related to Christmas!  Happy quilting!