I finished up my large floor pillow covers today. Just in time for Fall. I realize that yesterday while working on assembling them. I had seen this beautiful wall quilt in the Fresh Modern Quilts group pool on Flickr earlier in the day. It’s a quilt by Jolene Klassen from the Blue Elephant Stitches blog. By reading her blog post, I learned that she was participating to the Celebrate Color for Fall contest hosted by Rachel Hauser on her blog Stitched in Color.

So while sewing I had this on my mind, and I realize that my pillow colors were indeed fall colors. And  what a coincidence, I would be able to finish them up on the First Day of Fall! They were perfect for Rachel’s contest.

I bought the main fabric, the one used for the center pieces and binding, last Fall. It’s a Moda fabric from the Harvest collection by Blackbird Designs. I had a crush for it and tough it would be perfect for my living room which is all in soft colors. I wanted to had some colors, but nothing too saturated. So I found those greens, reds, yellows, browns and creams that fitted well with the birds fabric.

The pillow cover design is of my own. In fact, I’m currently working on writing a pattern. For those interested, I’ll keep you updated once it’s ready. I also made the design for the quilting which I transferred on the fabric using white Saral transfer paper.
The white wasn’t ideal for the cream fabric but great with the other colors. It
did a fairly good job and it all went off after I washed the pillow
covers. My only comment is that it does come off by rubbing. So moving
the fabric around while quilting did make some lines partly disappear. Anyway, I was only using the design as a guideline. I preferred that over
the Glad Press’n Seal technique which I had used for the table runner. It’s a bit messy when you try to remove the film after the quilting is done.

 

For the back, I used a home decor weight cotton in cream that I had in my stash. I finally decided to make an envelope closure.

 

For stitching the binding, I tried Malka Dubrawsky’s technique from stitch in dye. She top-stitches the binding in place using a zig zag stitch on her sewing machine. She shows this in different projects in her latest book Fresh Quilting. I like the result. But, I did have a bit of difficulty with the first corners.

I think my two little boys are going to like those pilllows. Particularly the younger one (21 months), which loves looking at the birds and singing “Tit-tit-tit-tit-tit” when he sees one on the electrical wires in the backyard. There is plenty of them because just behind our house there is a field (photo taken last fall).

Have a nice Fall everyone!