A Willing Worker...: New Pillows for the Couch

Whew - after a hiatus in July for travel and illness there has been lots of sewing going on the last few weeks. Time to catch up and post the finished projects.

First up is a few pillows. We have some throw pillows on our couch that have been thrown a few too many times and are all floppy and lumpy. I've been meaning to replace them for a while now and new pillows seemed like a great project a few weeks ago when I was recovering from a nasty stomach bug and needed a quick, easy, instant-gratification type of project.

I made two 18'' quilt blocks from a coordinating set of fabrics I picked up over a year ago (with these pillows in mind, no less, because they match our living room color scheme).

One is a star pattern. I've been wanting to try this star block for a few years. It came together nicely, but I won't be doing a whole quilt of these blocks. One star block has 24 pieces, half of them are the reverse of the other half, and they are all odd shaped triangles. Translation: very easy to get the pieces confused. I had a hard enough time keeping things straight for one block - I can't imagine doing a whole quilt made of this block. Also, since the pillow form is puffy and rounded, when you look at the pillow from afar you can't really see any of the oh-so-carefully matched star points on the edges. If I do it again, I'll make the star smaller and put a border around it so that you can see all the star points at first glance and the border will be the part that gets 'rounded off' on the curvy pillow. Who knows, maybe it'll get better as the pillow gets used and flattened out? I quilted it by machine and outlined the interior of each triangle shape. It involved lots of corner-turning but I wanted to accentuate the triangle/star pattern rather than run over all the seams and have a mish-mosh of seams in each corner.

The other pillow is a simpler pattern - just a series of squares - and I really like how it turned out. I am too anal/organized/OCD to do a random scrappy look so I had to at least put them in diagonal rows by color. For me its a good mix of organized and scrappy. I quilted this one a bit inside each seam and I like how the stitching ties it all together.