Leafy, scrappy pillows

My best friend and her husband recently bought a very nice new couch. Once they got it in the living room, it quickly became apparent that she was in desperate need of new pillows to put on her new couch. Much discussion and google image searching later, we decided to make these leafy pillows out of scraps, since she'd already spent a good chunk of cash on the couch. I, of course, decided I wanted some too!

The only fabric we bought is the unbleached cotton for the front. Everything else is scraps. Even the back fabric was free!

She is making hers closed all the way around since she didn't using pillow forms, but I did so I made the backs of mine overlapping flaps for easy removal and washing. (Last fall I lost my favorite throw pillows to a washing machine accident that I do not want to repeat!)

For just a bit of added whimsey and fun, we put a owl in each tree. Almost unnoticeable, but a great detail. Did you notice the owls before I mentioned them?

These were fun to make. You should make some too! If you do, I have one tip to offer. Use Heat'n Bond to make the leaves into iron-on appliques. You can buy it by the yard for super cheap at most fabric stores. This helped a lot for two reasons. First, it made tracing and cutting out the leaves super fast. Second, it perfectly held them nicely in place, without having to mess with pinning, while stitching the tight zig zag around the edges.

We had a few leftover leaves, so I sewed them onto a onesie for my nephew.

Batik Ombre Quilt

A while back a good friend of mine gave me a HUGE box of batik fabrics, in every color of the rainbow, cut into 10x3 inches rectangles. The fabric is all beautiful and the thing that struck me the most was how the colors changed so gradually from light to dark. I wanted to play off that quality to make almost an ombre effect for a quilt. I needed to crank out a top pretty quickly before my next opportunity at the long arm and my least favorite part of quilting is cutting pieces, so I didn't for this quilt! Just lined them up in a pleasing gradient and stitched away. I really love how this turned out and it makes me want to do several more similar ones. I think the same effect in blue and green would be very pretty.

For the back, I found a very pretty fabric with tiny, batik-looking green flowers. I think it complements the front nicely.

The quilt is about 70 inches by 80 inches. Not big enough for a bed, but just about perfect for snuggling up in a comfy chair with a good book and a hot cup of coffee. That sounds so good, I think I'm going to do that now.