Pillows To Match

As I mentioned last Saturday, I had some charms from the MODA Tranquility line leftover.

Well, it happens to be around the time of my mother's birthday, so why not make her some matching pillows for her reversible quilt!?!


I briefly thought about a reversible pillow, but I think having two works better. Plus, she has this really wonky loooong pillow on her couch and I thought it'd be fun to make a case for that.

And really, I find sleeve-pillows like the ones I wrote a tutorial for much easier to make than ones with buttons or zippers, so the back wouldn't really be for presentation anyway.


From this distance, they turned out great, no?

I had a bit of trouble with the white pillow - I find it difficult to get the right measurements of pillows - they never quite behave the same along their entire length, they're less puffy at the ends, so my pillowcase tends to be too big at the ends and/or too tight around the middle.


In this case, I just eye-balled stuff and ended up having to make a wider back than front to fit the pillow. Which means that the top and bottom seams are actually on the front side instead of the top and bottom - but hey, if I hadn't spilled the beans, you'd never know :)


Enough talk, here are the pillows with the quilt tops (two tops, really - no back).


I also had fun using a stitch OTHER than straight or zig-zag - which is all my own machine manages (but the quilting attachments are cheap, yay!). So here's the finishing stitch I used to applique the charm squares onto the navy pillow (the white one is obviously pieced). I folded the edges under, rather than raw-edge applique as I'm a bit tired of that look.


That stitch sure uses a lot of thread! However, I think I might actually try quilting with a zig-zag stitch on a quilt soon - with a contrasting thread, that might be a really neat effect. We shall see!