Wednesday, January 25, 2017

The Annual Fundraiser Pillow

For the past few years, I've made a silent auction prize for my dear friend's ringette team fundraiser. First year it was a quilt (with a how-to tutorial to boot), then I scaled things back to pillows (2014, 2015, 2016).

Throw pillows have been very well-received in past years (by guys, actually, which is quite cool) so I decided I shouldn't mess with success.

pillow front

I'm perfecting my process for making my rainbow gradient pillows, so it made sense to make one for the auction:

Pillow back 

For the zipper, I used the technique from Krista Spotted Stones's book Beyond Cotton, but I used glue dried with the tip of my iron instead of pins to keep the zipper in place for sewing.

As usual, the quilting is all Aurifil thread in 50 and 40 weights, depending on what colours matched my needs.

Rainbow gradient pillow - quilting

Rainbow gradient pillow quilting

My organic quilting technique is very similar to the one Debbie A Quilter's Table describes in her wonderful tutorial. I do a few straight lines then fill in with the wavier ones, trying to more or less mirror-image the curves.

Rainbow Gradient pillow quilting detail

Like my chair? Another small-town thrift shop score. We got six of them and save for a little scratching on the seats from being stacked, these are some classic made-in-Canada church basement beauties that even still have the original rubber stoppers on the bottom of the metal legs.

Rainbow gradient pillow front

Rainbow gradient pillow back

It appears that this is my first finish of 2017! Yay! Here's to lots more!

5 comments:

  1. Your pillow is spectacular! Your rainbows are fab! Thanks for the reference to the quilting tutorial. This type of quilting is my "thing" but I do mine even less structured. I'm going to try this method next time!

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  2. Your pillow is spectacular! Your rainbows are fab! Thanks for the reference to the quilting tutorial. This type of quilting is my "thing" but I do mine even less structured. I'm going to try this method next time!

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  3. Gorgeous pillow - love the fabric you have used. We have three of those style of chairs that arrived in our shipping from NZ last summer. They make me smile. We had lots of even smaller toddler size ones when we lived there but I had to pass them on when we left!

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  4. Fab pillow - you are getting them perfected for sure! I remember a few meetings sitting on chairs just like those! Great score!

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  5. Love your use of colour - this is just gorgeous!

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