I’ve been sketching ideas for months and months for a pillow I wanted to create for my best friend. She LOVES orange, and so I’ve been collecting fabric as I went along. I finally sat down and decided I should do SOMETHING, and I had finally gotten all the pieces to try a string quilt, so I decided I’d go with that. I used Film in the Fridge’s tutorial here.

I cut strips of all the orange fabric, and put them into three piles, dark orange, medium orange, goldish/light orange. I used Kona Charcoal for the solid and decided on a whim to do one half of each square as a mixture of light and medium orange, and the other side a mixture of dark and medium orange.

The scrapbooking paper I was using turned out to be more like thin cardstock, which made it super easy to tear off, but also left the seams kinda loose. I’ll have to pick up some thinner paper at some point. I would definitely enjoy making another one of these, it was super fun, quick and easy!

Once I had my four squares, I realized a couple of things. One, my finished pillow was going to be about 23″ square which is HUGE. Two, there’s a lot of different ways to line up four squares!

I tried a few layouts:

Layout idea #1

Layout idea #3

Layout #2 is missing because that’s the one I went with.

The first layout reminded me of a sunset, and I thought it was quite pretty. However, I realized it wasn’t really featuring the orange as much as the gold. The third layout just didn’t do it for me at all, so in the end I decided to go with the orange center.

I took some of my scraps, sewed them together randomly, cut it down, and made the back. Then I used my favorite zipper tutorial (here) and voila, new pillow! (I make it sound easy, but really there was a lot of tearing out of seams and a miscalculation on the back which required cutting more fabric, and I couldn’t find my seam ripper so I was tearing out all the seams using a pin. But! Done!)

Front of the pillow

Back of the Pillow

The pillow is kind of comically large, so I took a picture of it with my St. Bernard, to give some perspective on what a 23″ pillow looks like.

Mishka + pillow

I’m cutting up some fabric to make binding tonight for my sliced coin quilt. So that should FINALLY be done soon, too! Yay, summer!

With a little late night sewing, I was able to finish both of the knitting needle rolls, which is good as they’re going to their recipients later this afternoon!

I used the tutorial here, and ended up doing some modifications for the second roll. There is a typo in the tutorial, when doing the second pocket, it says the first width is 3″, but it should be 2.5″. Keep that in mind if you decide to follow the tutorial. Another tip, it calls for way more fabric than you need. Other than for the solid, I’m pretty sure you could get away with a fat quarter. I haven’t measured it out, but it seemed like I had a ton of leftovers.

I worked with the apple and mustard version first, and wow, can you tell. I am however, fairly pleased with how it came out.

Inside of the roll, complete with knitting needles!

Outside of the roll

Lessons learned: take all the pins out before you turn your project right-side out. No, really.  And triple check that you got them all. I was flattening the thing after it was turned and jammed both my thumbs straight into pins on either side.  After searching I found FIVE pins hidden between layers. For the next iteration of the project, I re-pinned every time I added a layer, instead of pinning over the old ones.

Slip-stitching isn’t something you can just wing. I found a tutorial here, and I found that it helped a lot with the second iteration.

I don’t know the first thing about how to “trim” seams. Oof. Didn’t learn that one by the second one EITHER.

With a lotta layers, you gotta make the hole to turn through a bit on the larger side or it stretches the fabric around it and you end up with a really messy slip-stitched seam. Or y’know, be more careful when turning.

I like the purple end of my pen (disappearing ink) better than the blue (rub with damp (wow I just accidentally typed damn, guess that’s how I felt about it) cloth to make disappear ink). A LOT better. There’s still blue hiding in the seams..

So for the second roll, I found that I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this fabric combination. I do want to see how it’d look with a soft grey (Kona ash maybe?) instead of the white, as it turns out it’s a bit see-through and you can see the dark seams. But I’m in love with how this one looks.

Love the pink, black, white combo SO much.

I thought I'd want a black ribbon, but I really like this colorful addition. It is "Geranium" colored grosgrain ribbon.

I did a much better job with this version, no pricking myself with pins, and things generally went together better. If I were to use the white again, I’d make the back with a double layer of white so you couldn’t see the black seams from the pockets on the other side. It’s not flagrant, but it is noticeable if you look.

Here they are, all rolled up and ready to go!

Rolled and tied, and ready for action!

I have quite a bit of leftovers (see my note above), so I may have to do something fun with this color combo to keep. I just adore it. And I like how the back looks a bit like a kimono. I also enjoyed the way the black thread looked. So maybe I’ll use some of the scraps for a try at free motion embroidery!