Christmas Presents: Pillows

Happy Tuesday habibis! It’s present time!

I could probably write a post a day for the month of January showcasing the different Christmas presents I made this year. Instead I’ve combined them by theme. Today’s theme is pillows.  I have four to show you.

I mentioned a while ago that my Aunt D, who also sews and quilts some, decided she didn’t want to keep a stash and gifted her fabric to me. It was a big Macy’s box full of fabric. I decided (it might have been my mother’s suggestion – she’s so smart) to make Aunt D a Christmas present using some of her scraps. My mom definitely consulted when it came to fabric choices and Aunt D’s color preferences. I knew I was thinking some kind of lattice work design.   Aunt D had a pansy fabric that I love, which would look pretty as the center of each block. (My favorite flower is the poppy, but I find pansies incredibly appealing and pleasant to look at – maybe it’s the combination of purple and yellow in one flower.) My mom suggested yellow, and of course that would perfectly complement the yellow in the pansies. And what else but green to go with it? Aunt D also had a lovely green on white ivy print. It actually reminds me of the mountain house my grandparents had when I was a kid – one bedroom was entirely decorated with a green on white ivy print and it was so airy. So I picked the pansies and the ivy and pulled a pale yellow out of my stash – it’s the backing print from this yellow and orange quilt I made my other grandmother.  I made a windowpane/latticework pattern – pansies in the center, then yellow, then the ivy.

Aunt D also gave me a nice forest green – not that I’m lacking those, after making R and M’s wedding quilt, but I used hers because it’s richer than the hues in my forest green prints, and also it’s from her stash. I used that to make the back, with a strip of pansies on the envelope closure to make it pretty. The closure doesn’t overlap as much as I’d like – I guess I miscalculated – but otherwise I’m 100% happy with the pillow, and Aunt D was delighted to recognize some of her fabrics in her present. I’m putting the rest of her stash to good use, too – some of those fabrics will feature in future posts.

The other three pillows are for my mom’s family – my grandma, my Aunt M (my mom’s sister, not my aunt M my dad’s sister), and my cousin S, M’s daughter.  I’ve made stuff for my grandma before – in fact, I’m sure I made her a green and pink star quilt years ago, but I haven’t seen it in years, so who knows. S reminded me that I made her pillows a few years ago but I have only the vaguest memory of what those look like.  I’m pretty sure I haven’t ever made anything for Aunt M. I decided it was high time I made them all something. I thought matching/coordinated pillows would be cute. I talked to S about color choices. She likes light blue and Aunt M likes yellow. I had already decided to use gold to tie all the pillows together, since I had so much gold fabric leftover from R and M’s quilt, and to do my grandma’s pillow in gold and forest green. It would match her couch, and green was my grandpa’s favorite color so now it’s more special for her.

I wanted my grandma’s to be a checkerboard pattern but I cut wrong and didn’t have enough of that gold. So I added another gold print and made this modified design. The back is forest green with gold on the envelope closure.

For S I decided to do diagonal stripes in gold and light blue. I actually sewed them into a big block of vertical stripes, then cut a diamond the size of the pillow out and turned it on its side to get the diagonal. I used the corners of the big block to make the back, with extra blue for a border and the envelope closure.

For Aunt M I wanted to do something with half square triangles and make it kind of like the gold emanating from one point. While I was thinking of the design I was reminded of the line from Romeo and Juliet: “It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.”  I decided to name this pillow “and Juliet is the sun.” It’s like the sun rising.  I didn’t make a tag or anything, or even tell Aunt M the name of the pillow. (Half the time I don’t even name my quilts, much less a pillow.) However, that is the pillow’s name. I pulled lots of gold prints to make the HSTs and I used extra HST blocks and extra gold fabric for the back.

Here’s the three of them together:

That’s four presents down…and a bunch to go. Plus everything I’m working on now. It’s funny how I used to sometimes start a project just so I had something to post – because I used to only work on one quilt at a time and they’re usually presents. Guess I don’t have that problem anymore. Suddenly it feels like I’m working on everything!