A Pillow in the Making

The lovely Laura Gunn recently sent me a charm pack of her soon to be released line Cosmos. I’ll admit that coming up with an idea for the fabric had me stumped for a bit. Laura has a beautiful watercolor style to her fabrics but most of these are done with a large scale print. So working with a 5″ x 5″ piece of each print had me thinking.

I wanted to do something that showed off the organic nature of her designs and also the intense colors in the prints. I foolishly miscalculated on my first attempt at a plan ( a + pillow design) and realized that I would need more fabric than I had…which I couldn’t get. So I scrapped that idea…tried out a few more… and then finally realized that I should do a raw edge applique pillow. Why? Who knows why. The fabric spoke and I listened.

Then it didn’t take at all long to realize that I what I wanted to make had been done well by others already and I followed their lead. (AKA I copied their ideas! lol) So my pillow in progress is COMPLETELY inspired by Jolene’s and Brioni’s pillows. And here is mine.

I did varying degrees of zig zag stitching around the petals that I just hand cut to have a similar shape to the other ladies’ pillows. I used some steam – a – seam lite to hold those petals in place while sewed them all on. And I used the fabrics that had the most saturation in color because I really wanted them pop off the fabulous neutral texty background. A little hand back stitch gives it final touch.

Obviously I’m not done…this is just the pillow front. But I’ll throw the rest of it together pretty quickly I hope and soon have a new pillow for one of the guest beds! A big thanks to Laura for letting me play with her pretty fabrics. I love this kind of challenge!