Petal Pillow / Cushion Cubed

Before I went to London for the Quilt Bee meet up I knew I wanted to make something to say ‘thanks’ to the lovely Jen for hosting AND for making me not one, but two pants bags!!

I love a good cushion and had an idea I’d scribbled down on some paper that I thought would be interesting to try. So I set about trying to figure out quite how it would all go together.

I grabbed as many pink and purple (I had the inkling Jen likes pink) fabrics as I could lay my hands on and set about piecing some squares within squares. The idea being that I would make three interlocking squares to go across the cushion.

It wasn’t quite as easy as I expected, but got a lot better once I realised that I couldn’t just make the squares and put them together. There needed to be some planning…….and puzzling.

I finished the top, basted and decided that I didn’t want to go with my natural instinct to straight line quilt it. Instead I was going to try a bit of FMQ as I thought Jen would appreciate that more.

Not something I do very often and not something I know much about!!

To start off I opted for flowers within the blocks, I love the chrysthanthemums (thank you spell check!) so had a go at those first with pale pink. The thing is the pink didn’t quite cut it. Although I had wanted a subtle look, it just didn’t look great so I then tried the risky approach of adding darker petals around the lighter flower.

This went ok, which was lucky!

From there I really didn’t know where to go. It didn’t look right to stick with the flowers as the rest looked a bit bare.

I knew that I could probably spend weeks contemplating the sprial vs the squiggle, the pebble vs the loop and still not get any closer to making a decision. So I just repeated the petal pattern around the squares until it felt right to stop. You may have seen this process on my instagram.

After that I wanted something to break it up a bit but repeat the shape so I used a lighter thread to quilt the lines as you can see here…..

Then I went for a little super small squiggling which I love. I hadn’t tried it this teeny before, but it’s so fun to do and feels lovely!

I added some zig zaggy bias binding and pink elephants on the back and away we go.

It is now in its new home, soon to be moving a little nearer to its place of origin…. I hope it will be happy!!

 Cushion Stats

Pattern: I made it up

Fabrics

• Front: Scrappy – out to sea, briar rose etc
• Background: Metro Living Circles – Robert Kaufman
• Binding: Ziggy – Timeless Treasures
• Back: Elephants – not sure they were one of my first fabric buys

Quilting: FMQ by Me using Aurifil 40wt!

Size:   Around 20″ x 20″ probably. I forgot to measure, but BIG!!

 

Linking up with A Lovely Year of Finishes

And Crazy Mom Quilts!