Wednesday, January 15, 2014

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....

3 comments:

  1. Just love them! What a great idea for home décor!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Each one is lovely, Belinda! But, I truly love mine best!

    Robin

    ReplyDelete
  3. Belinda, you are one busy girl. These pillows are wonderful and the pink ornaments from your previous post are so cute, too. Very cute and very creative.

    ReplyDelete