Gifted Quilts & Pillows

If it feels like it’s been awhile since we have shared the projects we’re working on, that’s because it has! We spent the last several months working on a large project that we can’t share yet, so it looks like there’s not much happening. Rest assured we have been hard at work!

One thing that we can share that we have been doing is making quilted gifts for Christmas and birthdays. We did four throw size quilts for Christmas, and two quilted pillows for January and February birthdays. Pillows make great gifts because they are so much faster to make.

Christmas Quilts

For the Christmas quilts, the goal was to use up as much stash fabric as possible. In fact, the only thing we had to buy was one flannel backing!

This rainbow striped quilt was actually made from leftover trimmings of a pieced backing I made for the throw size Intersection Shift Quilt. I trimmed each rainbow stripe to be the same size, then added the white and purple sashing and borders. It is so satisfying to use every last bit of fabric!

Because we were short on time, I sent all of these Christmas quilts to my friend Cami for digital edge-to-edge quilting. She did a fantastic job, and it was so amazing to just have that be done without any work on my part.

Since I had just random bits of fabric to work with, it was a bit of mental work to decide how to put them together. This fabric was leftover from an upcoming Crimson Crown quilt kit. We had just finished making the sample for it last May when we heard that Bluprint was closing, so unfortunately that kit never came out. Luckily, we had enough leftover to make this Star Break Quilt (free pattern from Fort Worth Studios).

I had never had anything digitally quilted before, and it’s just amazing to see it done so perfectly. This feather design really went with the style of fabric in this quilt.

If you have a bunch of fat quarters and need a quick quilt, the Fat Quarter Pile Up is a great free pattern. It’s also great for bigger prints that you don’t want to chop up too small. We had this Tall Tales fat quarters from Birch Fabrics that we have been holding onto for years. We used them for a Double Crossed Table Runner when we were guest designers for the IAQ. Sometimes we have a hard time sewing with the same line over and over, you know?

This last quilt from the Christmas gift set was a lot of fun. These Dusk till Dawn fabric scraps are from a quilt that you haven’t seen yet. All of those blocks are just improv sewn together, then trimmed down to the same size. I added sashing with little cornerstones to make the quilt just a bit bigger. You can see I had to do a scrappy binding as well, but it goes with the style of the quilt.

Birthday Pillows

I made pillows as gifts for my daughter’s 12th and my niece’s 8th birthdays.

I hacked Elizabeth Hartman’s Dinosaurs pattern into a body pillow, since I have already made this daughter too many quilts, for now. Her patterns are always a big complicated, but the results are amazing. (I’ve been working Fancy Forest off and on for years now.)

I was able to get all four dinosaurs to fit a body pillow form from Target, and now I don’t know why I haven’t made more pillows this size. It’s great for watching movies, reading books, you name it.

Once again, all of these fabrics are from my stash. That gray cross weave from Moda is a great textured background.

My niece got this giant Harry Potter pillow, which is also a size I love to make: 26″ x 26″. You can get inexpensive down inserts in this size from IKEA. I used the 10″ size blocks from the Harry Potter Quilt Along by Sew Fresh Quilts.

These blocks are always a hit. I made a quilt using the 20″ blocks for the same daughter that got the dinosaurs pillow, but it was so quickly loved that I never even took finished pictures of it! You can see the quilt top on Instagram:

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These 10″ blocks were perfect for this size of pillow with the added sashing. I used Harry, Hermione, Luna, and Ron. For the cornerstones, I fussy cut as many of these out of print owls by Sarah Watts as I could get from the piece I had left.

All in all, a great gifting season! Do you like to make quilted gifts for others?

Things coming up: some new magazine features, a new quilt pattern, and a sew along for the Artist Portfolio pattern! Stay tuned for more details.