Purple Pillow for Michele

I made this purple pillow for one of my best friend's new apartment - actually I made two identical ones for her. I used the same pattern as I did for the bunny pillow and the Joel Dewberry faux bois/birds pillow.

The flowered fabric is a Japanese imported fabric I bought from purl soho, and the striped fabric is from the American Jane series from Moda. I think it's an ideal stripy fabric, and it comes in lots of nice colors that have the feeling of being just slightly faded.

You may notice that I'm trying to make a leap forward here in terms of setting "set dressing" my photos. The chicken and I enjoyed playing with props and creating a "view in a room" feeling (like in westelm.com) though there's a lot more I'd like to learn about my camera in terms of light and clarity.

Toasty Wool Pillow for Icebat

I just completed my second wool pillow. I made it for Icebat. Like the last one, it was inspired by the Japanese book "wool patchwork: warm quilt for the home."



I purchased these packs of felted wool from The City Quilter. They are from Wild Thymes Pattern Co., and they look quite appealing in their little stacks.



I was inspired by this lovely picture from the book. I love how their version is both wooly and lemony at the same time.



They have some instructions in Japanese in the back, but I could figure out what I wanted to do by looking at the photo, so I didn't refer to them. Here's my quick sketch for my version of the project. I carry around a little notebook of graph paper for this purpose - sometimes I work things out on the subway. This is one of the simplest designs ever - it's almost embarrassing to put it here:



I'm finding using the cotton fill pretty liberating, because when I use it I'm not married to any particular pillow size. I decided to make the pillow 12" x 12" because I thought it would be cute.

I played with the squares until I got something I liked:



I don't know if you can see it here, but there is a nice herringbone mixed in there. These little pieces of wool are rather expensive, and I caught myself obsessing at a brunch this weekend over my friend's vintage pants. I can see myself going out and trolling the flea markets for some old clothing - because if I'm going to continue with the wool pillow making I need to find a cheaper way to do it.



The wool was considerably more difficult to iron than the cotton quilt fabric I'm used to. I normally iron both the seam allowances in one direction, but with the wool, I carefully pressed the seam allowances open so that they wouldn't be too thick. I really had to lean on the iron to get those seams to stay down!

Then I took a bowl of pom-poms, sat down with my favorite cup of tea, and set upon the task of sewing those cute little pom-poms onto the pillow top. This is a good activity to do while watching TV.



Cute as a button! I like how Icebat looks both bashful and proud in this picture - I intentionally chose the pom-poms to match him. Ta-da!

Toasty Yellow Wool Pillow

Here's my latest pillow. Yay!



I bought this book "wool patchwork: warm quilt for the home" in the Kinokuniya bookstore in Japantown in San Francisco. I'd never seen it before, and I haven't seen it since. I couldn't find it on Amazon - but you could special order it from your local bookstore by ISBN 4-579-10894-9.



Above is a photo from this lovely book - there are many tempting projects in here. I based my pillow on the top one on that pile.



I was planning to do an envelope back like I usually make, but the felting on the wool made the pieces uneven (see the right side above), and when I squared them off, the patchwork top couldn't fit a standard pillow. Well, I have lots of leftover cotton fill from my tiny pincushion project:



I hand sewed a running stitch going through the seam allowance on the other side, as the book instructions illustrated:





Looks real nice!



I made the back out of a fabric from Denyse Schmidt's Katie Jump Rope line.



We love pillows!

Bunny Pillow - complete!

I finished the bunny pillow I started last week. I really think this is one of my favorite patterns so far. I have sketched out how I might execute it as a quilt. I'm feeling very enthusiastic about this - though I've never quilted anything but a small piece of muslin. However, I'm taking a couple of quilting classes at the City Quilter next month - two couple hour workshops - machine quilting and freestyle machine quilting.

I have a few good books on quilting - but I just haven't been able to take the plunge into actually doing it. I'm even intimidated by "stitch in the ditch." I know I should try it on something small like one of my pillow tops, but I hate the idea that I could ruin my hard work on the patchwork by amateurish quilting.



Here's a side view of the pillow - I love the combo of the colors and patterns. I'm sticking with this tangy navy and orange theme for a lot of my patchwork pillow variations. It hasn't been done in recent CB2 and West Elm and the other catalogues or magazines I get, so it feels fresh to me.



Here's one more beauty shot!

Fabric credits:
Orange stripes - from the American Jane series
Bunnies - Japanese import
Border/flowers - Denyse Schmidt Katie Jump Rope series

Joel Dewberry Pillow Set

I was very excited by how my bunny pillow worked out. I was eager to reuse this particular interlocking grid pattern from my Japanese Quilt Blocks book. Compared to the other patterns I'd tried from the book, this was probably the easiest/least time consuming, and I like it because it conveys the same complexity as the others visually, but with less effort. That is, I think only a quilter would realize this is a less complex pillow to complete than the others.

I decided to go back to this fabric that I already had in my stash, to make a companion pillow for the lumbar pillow and coasters I had made a couple of months ago.



Unlike the bunny fabric, however, the Sparrows (in Almond) fabric from the Joel Dewberry Aviary line is what's considered a "fussy" fabric - which in this context means a fabric that you have to cut and sew carefully to make select parts of the pattern appear where you want to them to. I have only used a fussy fabric once before, which was a large print Heather Bailey fabric for my "Spring Pillow for Fall," and in both of these cases, it definitely added planning and cutting time to the project.



I laid out the project in advance - I did want that middle bird to be off center, but for some reason didn't realize that it would be cut off because of seam allowance. Ah well, grist for the mill - I learn something new on every project.



I finished off the pillow using another faux bois fabric from Joel Dewberry - Woodgrain in Orange. I really like how cartoony the Chocolate version of the wood grain looks applied in this particular quilt block. I like the orange version too, but the high contrast in the chocolate makes the woodgrain easier to "read" - even across the room.



Here's one last shot for the hell of it!

bunny pillow - preview

I don't typically publish works-in-progress to my blog or to my flickr photostream, but I'm so darned excited by this pillow top I just can't help it. I'm also a little tired of seeing my previous project at the top of the page!



I've been working my way through the book Japanese Quilt Blocks to Mix and Match, and I've had my eye on the above pattern for some time. I like they way the stripes cross over each other and give the appearance of interlocking, and I've been on the look out for an appropriate striped fabric to try it out with.

The name of the pattern is Yosegi kawari royagoshi - translated in the book as "Prison grille check variation." I am trying to ignore the unfortunate jail reference, and think of this more as a decorative window onto a field of bunnies!




I stumbled upon this Japanese bunny fabric in Purl the other day, and I quickly purchased it. Who can resist bunnies? I really like the simplicity of these, especially against the unfussy background. They also reminded me of some little bags I picked up when I was in Kyoto a couple of years ago, so there's sort of layers of built in nostalgia in this fabric for me - good memories of my pet rabbit Hazel from childhood, and of one of my favorite trips in adulthood.



Here's the finished pillow-top. Weird angle, I know! The orange stripes are from the Peas and Carrots series - I've enjoyed some of the other fabrics from this series - for instance, the kind of cartooney ovals I used on my South Park pillow. The border is from Denyse Schmidt's Katie Jump Rope series.

More to come when I've completed the back of the pillow!

Japanese Quilt Block: Spring Pillow for Fall

Here's my latest pillow, which is based on a block from the inspiring book Japanese Quilt Blocks to Mix and Match by Susan Briscoe. I just discovered her website and I'm thinking about reaching out to her - I've gotten so much out of this book! I'm hoping she might like to see some interpretations of her work.



I also have her book The Ultimate Sashiko Sourcebook, but I'm trying to resist the siren song of sashiko as I already have my hands full with an ambitious original embroidery project.

As folks who read my August posts know, I've been experimenting with patterns (primarily using dark blues) from this book, including:

Block #14: Kurume kasuri musubi (knot)
Block #5: Kurume kasuri igeta (Kurume well curb)
Block #6: Yamato kasuri igeta (Yamato well curb)

For this next pillow my specific goal was to enliven up a room that was somewhat depressingly matchy-matchy, and I wanted it to go with the colorful Heather Bailey pillow I'd already made for the bed.



I wanted to chose a design that would showcase Heather Bailey's bold fabric from her Freshcut series. Briscoe's book has a few patterns that remind me of a frame or window onto a vista, giving the block an elegant dimensionality. I settled on block 29 - Yosegi koshi kumitate (check frame).



I sketched out my interpretation of the block on graph paper. All the designs in the book are for 9" quilt blocks. I prefer the look and size of 16" square pillows but I wasn't up to doing the math - I simply "doubled the recipe" to make it for an 18" pillow.

Briscoe's designed calls for 2 different background colors, with the middle square cut on a diagonal. I merged these into my one featured fabric.



I went about this project very carefully and methodically, because it involved a lot of small pieces, and a "fussy" piece of fabric - fussy meaning that I wanted to keep the pattern framed in a specific way, so it was important that I didn't get confused and turn a piece upside down or change its orientation in the block.



I generally like to take shortcuts, like cutting as I go, or piecing together multiple strips fabric and then cutting them, but I knew there were too many potential pitfalls to take this approach.



The only shortcut I took was string-piecing the smaller pieces.



I enjoyed taking photos in the natural light!



I followed the instructions to end up with three large strips:



You'll notice by this point the natural light has faded as I push the project into the evening...



Finally done!

As usual, I put some special effort into the back:



I love to look at all the colors and patterns together:



... and somebody else does too!

Mmmm... More Japanese Quilt Block Pillows

My latest project is another one from the book Japanese Quilt Blocks to Mix and Match.

I had purchased some blue fabric last week, and constructed block #5, otherwise known as Kurume kasuri igeta.

I was very happy with the results, and have been plotting since then about what block to do next. I settled on the very next one, #6 - Yamato kasuri igeta (Yamato well curb).



I am truly attracted to the simplicity of the designs and colors laid out in the book, but I like to add just a little bit of pattern to add more texture and fun to the look.

First I pieced 5 strips of fabric together...



... and then cut them perpendicularly to create the 1st, 3rd, and 5th columns below.



I did this as a "time saving" method, but it left me with a lot of extra sewn fabric that I couldn't use for this project. Hopefully I'll be able to apply it another one.



I chain stitched the remaining squares for columns 2 and 4:



After I sewed the columns together, I added the outside strips. I adapted the "recipe" in the book from a 9" block to a 16" block, so there was some slight redesign involved, which I plotted out on a small piece of graph paper before starting.

The most major change was adding this colorful 1 1/2" border. Visually, I like to think it looks like the binding on a quilt.



So, here's the two blocks as they appear in the book:



And here they are transformed into pillows!



I was very pleased with the results and took many glamour shots:



As always, I couldn't resist putting some quirkiness into the back:



I like how splashes of color peek out when you pass them from diffferent angles:



Look who's happy for new pillows!!