Quick Quilted Pillow

Tonight I made this pillow! I had fun picking out whimsical fabrics from my collection of fat quarters. I love the yellow print especially, it looks like it was inspired by Mary Blair. I tried to pick out coordinating fabrics that also looked like they could belong in a Mary Blair painting.


To make this 8"x12" pillow, I cut out stripes of fabric 9" long and of different widths from the five fabrics. After sewing them together with half-inch seam allowances, I cut out a 9"x13" piece of fabric for the back and two duplicates of a plain yellow fabric (which I had leftover from a Gryffindor Quidditch robe), and then I sandwiched quilting batting between the nice fabric and the plain fabric. I quilted the layers together by hand-sewing with three strands of embroidery threads in vertical lines one inch apart, alternating between two lines of orange and two lines of lime green thread.


After quilting both the front and back, I put the two quilted pieces together back-to-back and sewed the edges (except for 4 inches on the bottom), clipped the corners, then turned it right-side out and pressed. I stuffed it with polyester fill and hand-sewed it closed. Ta-da!

Tree in the [Grass]

I received a request from a friend to do a tree painting for her using the elements she liked from my previous tree paintings. So this is what I came up with based off of the following criteria she presented me with:

- whimsical like the Eyvind Earle trees
- mysterious (not obvious) background
- light-colored background but not too light
- "green is good"

Having learned a lesson from my last painting, I started this one by painting the background. I liked how subtle vertical stripes fading into the background color can look like trees in a fog, so I started with fat green vertical stripes blending into a yellow background and then painted over them with another layer of yellow.

Next, I added in the grass in several layers of shades of green but decided that the grass really should be the foreground, so after painting on the tree silhouette I repainted a lot more grass over the bottom of the tree. The nice thing about grass is you can keep adding on as many layers as you want and it keeps giving the illusion of more and more depth.

On a /roll

Decorating the first group of pillowboxes was so much fun last night that I continued the project today and tried some different colors and styles. Mother's Day is coming up (my mom loves purple!) as well as several birthdays in our family. If I don't plan a gift ahead of time, there's always the last-minute gift card and if I already have these little boxes decorated, they would be a great way to quickly wrap up a gift card (with room to spare for a handful of candy!).

Playing with Colors

I painted a couple smaller 8x10 pictures to try out some different techniques and ideas. The smaller canvases are inexpensive and great for a beginner like myself. I could even paint over them and reuse the canvas later.