Our Modern Quilt Guild Chapter just completed a pillow swap, based on the format and rules of the Pillow Talk Swap. We had two months to make our pillow, after being assigned a member, given a list of their likes and dislikes (fabrics, colors, etc.), and having a mosaic they created to use as inspiration.

I’ve been trying to sew more with scraps of late, so I started with my box of white/beige/cream scraps and made a bunch oh wonky four-patches…Pieced them together randomly, adding strips to fill in where needed…Until I ended up with a 17″ square, which I added an envelope back to, sewed it into a 14″ pillow size, with an outer flange, quilted, and then added a fabric ruffle flower to for interest:Emma, the member I made this for really likes fabric flowers, as a matter of fact, she presented a program to our guild in January about how to make origami style fabric flowers.

The flower is made from scraps of bindings leftover from other quilt projects, sewed into one long strip, ruffled, sewed to the pillow in a circle with a quilted, trapunto style flower center appliqued on:I made the entire pillow on my Featherweight, including the quilting (because my Janome is set up with a quilt that is partially free-motion quilted and I didn’t want to change the settings):Quilting on a Featherweight…it’s possible! Actually, it worked quite well for this small project.

The pillow Jill made for me was SPOT ON as far as my likes/dislikes, my colors, and my studio decor (where the pillow will live)…I practically jumped up and down when I found out this was mine!

If you’d like to see the rest of the pillows that were swapped Thursday night, visit our flickr swap group. And go tell Jill how fabulous her/my pillow is!