All About the Birds and Bees...

Gotta love the instant gratification of small projects!  Our well-worn couch has had some pretty pathetic and beaten down pillows lately (I think it might have something to do with little people jumping on the couch when I’m not looking, but that’s another story).  One of our guild members made a gorgeous Mod Mosaic quilt based on Oh Fransson’s pattern that I had been dying to try, but I knew an entire quilt would take me forever and a day to complete and I would probably lose interest about halfway through. A pillow version would be perfect – which was what the tutorial was originally for anyways.  Score!

 

A dark plum couch is fantastic for hiding various food stains and general yuckiness, but it was a lot harder than I expected to find a fun fabric for accent pillows.  But thanks to Sew Fresh Fabrics (who’s booth at the Manchester International Quilt Show was the standout and highlight for me), I found Tula Pink’s Birds and Bees line in the purple colorway.  Perfection!  I worked on the two mosaic pillow tops here and there and finally got them done after a few weeks.  I quilted the tops in echoed wonky squares and the backs in a slight variation on Angela Walter’s “Chained Squares” design.  Can I just say how much I LOVE that pattern?  I’m probably going to quilt it on 2 or 3 more projects in a row!

 

But it turns out that I actually overestimated the amount of fabric I would need for 2 pillows…I actually bought enough to make 2 MORE.  I wanted to do something a little different with the same fabrics – how about a simple wonky log cabin?  Done and done – and in one weekend!  I know some of you are probably thinking that a pillow is more like a project for an afternoon, but one weekend is a big accomplishment around this house full of little people.  I wanted the quilting to be different on these two...how about concentric circles on the front and wavy lines on front?  Okay, let’s give it a try!

 

So now I have 4 new couch pillows and I am loving them!  And the funny part is that the wonky log cabin was a whim to use up extra fabric and I think that I actually like them a teeny bit more than my mosaic pillows.  I guess that’s why my sewing has more than a little serendipity involved.  Oops – I mean sewendipity. 

 

Now lets just see how long it takes for them to get covered in cracker crumbs and juice stains.