Last year Riley Blake Designs got together with the Modern Quilt Guild and challenged members to take a bundle of 6 fat eighths and make something out of them. Your project had to be completed by Feb 17th to qualify. You could use anywhere from 1 to all 6 of the fabrics and combine them with any other Riley Blake print or a solid fabric from your stash. I put my name into the challenge and my fabrics arrived in late September. When I opened the package I was hoping that I would immediately be inspired. Unfortunately that didn’t happen. I had no idea what I would do with the fabrics.
I put my package aside and completely forgot about it. Fast forward to Valentines day and I saw the package sitting on my cutting table. Now what??? 3 days to design, cut, piece, quilt and bind my project. Yikes! I decided that I was going to make a pillow in the style of a quilt, using batting to give the pillow top dimension when it was quilted and having binding on the edges. I laid the fabrics out and just started cutting odd shapes and sewing them back together.
It took a couple of hours but I had the pillow top completed and ready for quilting. I decided to use a stiff, iron on batting to give the pillow some shape and structure. Since I was going to do mostly straight line quilting I decided to just use my domestic machine rather than my longarm. Dumb decision. By the time I was finished my shoulders were killing me and I had a mountain of threads to pull through to the back and tie off. It didn’t help that Tilly insisted on helping me quilt by standing on top of the fabric as I was trying to move it.
It took me a couple of hours to clean up the pillow top and then a few more hours to sew on the binding and then hand sew it onto the back of the pillow. All things considered I am pretty happy with the final project. Is it a modern quilting masterpiece? Nah….but for my first attempt at just winging not only the piecing but the quilting……I’m content with the final outcome.
