Pillow Swap

A few months ago, Amanda, the BAM* swap coordinator, organized a fabulous swap for us all, filled with scrappy pillowy goodness.  We each brought in an un-labeled brown paper bag containing our scraps, then she swapped them around among us.  We each took home a mystery bag of scraps that we were responsible for turning into a throw pillow. 

EEEEEK my first pillow!  I got a bag of dyed solids scraps that turned out to be from Leslie.  I have been interested in dyeing my own fabric, so I was excited to play with them.  But at the same time, I had never used something like that before OR made a pillow, and I was a little terrified.  After staring around like a deer in headlights for two days, I finally decided to bust out my own scraps and see if I came up with anything based on combining my scraps with hers. 

Success!  In fact, the fabric that I ultimately added was right there on top of my scrap bin; medium grey strips that I had cut for another quilt and then decided not to use.  I elected to do a checkerboard pattern using my grey scraps with the dyed scraps from Leslie.  The squares are 1" finished, and I hand quilted a second square inside of each colored square.

The pillow shell is about 15" across, but I put in a 16" pillow form because I like them looking a little overstuffed. 

And in the background is the back of the picnic quilt I made for my sister.  Yes, I am still holding it hostage.

The edges of the front are bordered out in the same grey, with machine quilted concentric squares. Originally I planned to do a plain envelope back, with a strip of her scraps pieced together next to the envelope edge.  It turned out that I didn't have enough of my grey fabric left to do an envelope back, so instead I pieced a back (slash "other front") and did some simple and minimal quilting:

Of course, no envelope closure meant that I needed to put in a zipper.  Eeek again! 

Whew.  That went in just fine.  That's probably thanks to all the zipper practice I got when we made goodie bags for the quilt retreat back in February.  Thanks Kelly for getting that pattern together and training us all on zippers! 

Leslie sent me a sweet little thank you message after the meeting.  I'm really glad that she likes it! 


*Bay Area Modern, our local modern quilt guild.  The acronym BAM is catching on, amidst a lot of Emeril jokes.