Double Halo Quilted Pillow
One of our favorite quick quilting projects is a pillow cover. It’s so much faster to make one quilt block and finish that than an entire quilt. It’s also great for quilting practice and trying out new blocks. But, the best part? Binding is optional! To start, we modified the Halo quilt block from the Quilt Block Cookbook, adding an extra row around the block, hence our pillow’s name, Double Halo.
We tried out a bunch of different things on this pillow cover. First, we used our ADORNit Flamingo Fever fabric while we were ambassadors for them. Our term has since finished, but we made the quilt block that turned into the pillow front and posted it on Instagram during that time.
With these directional fabrics, we paid close attention to make the pineapples all go the same direction, and the stripes to all point outward. Talk about a brain buster! 
Along with the ADORNit fabric, we used a number of coordinating prints from our stash. The green “x” print is a Cotton + Steel basic, and we used the coordinating 50 wt. thread from Sulky to quilt the pillow. This was our first time using the new Cotton + Steel thread, and so far we’re on board! For the back, we did a simple fold-over closure with a half yard from the stash.
The other new thing we did, besides lining up directional fabric and trying new thread, was to try a new machine binding method. This was shared by Jessee from Art School Dropout on her Instagram: 1) Stitch the binding to the front on the machine, 2) Flip the binding to the back and baste with Elmer’s washable school glue (using your iron to quickly dry the glue), and 3) Stitch the binding down from the front side in the ditch right next to the binding. We used our Bernina edge stitch foot and the results were good.
The Cotton + Steel thread is a perfect match! We quilted this baby on one of our domestic Berninas in straight lines with a walking foot, pretty much making it up along the way. 
You can see the binding stitch line a little better in this next photo. It’s a great in-between binding method, when you want the look of hand binding, but only have the time for machine binding.
The result of our multi-experimental pillow cover? Success! (We probably wouldn’t be showing it off otherwise…) We love playing around with new tricks and materials. Maybe you’ll see a photo tutorial for this binding method in the future. What do you think, is it something you’d like to try?
