Friendship Pillows

This year, for holiday gifts, I made several friendship pillows. Pillows are a great way to show off machine embroidery, along with quilting and patchwork!

The machine embroidered center of each pillow is a digitized design by my friend Shelli at Needle In A Haystack Designs called "True Friend Sampler"...Shelli does designs for both hand and machine embroidery - her digitized designs for machine embroidery are available at SWAKembroidery.com...and many of her hand embroidery patterns are available online at Pine Needles. I used beautiful rayon machine embroidery threads to match the fabrics I chose for each recipient...and embroidered the design on a natural unbleached single face quilted muslin fabric.

The patchwork/assembly part of each pillow is my own design. I used my AccuQuilt GO! Fabric Cutter to cut 2.5" squares (in some cases I used a mini charm pack) and 1.5" strips of cotton quilting fabric to frame the embroidery. I used an envelope pillow back with a Velcro closure...and even serged the inside raw edges to make the pillow covers washable.

I am thinking of putting together a few of these for my Etsy shop and already have several of the embroideries completed...you know, for my shoppers needing a handmade gift for a friend...

If you are a quilter or sewer/sewist, I hope this post will encourage you to add a little hand or machine embroidery to your next project....