Quilting: Pillowcases You Can Make

Quilting: Pillowcases You Can Make - as part of the expert series by GeoBeats. My name is Pippa Eccles. This one fits kind of a standard sized bed pillow and I call it the "fruit loops pillowcase" for obvious reasons I think, and basically to make this it uses reverse applique and regular applique. So this red background that you see is all one piece of fabric and then each of these little fruit loops is a circle that has another circle cut out on the inside and the outer part of the circle is applied using just regular applique and then you kind of tuck in this inner part and stitch it around and that is reverse applique. And for this one I did something I do a lot which is just matching threads for the actual quilting stitches that go through the three layers. I did matching colored threads and just kind of concentrated the stitches within each motif and then kind of just a general design on the background. These circles are just put on using regular applique and then for the bottle, it is actually patch worked first, so I sewed together the different strips and then I appliqued that onto the black background. And usually for something like this, I will kind of just make my own template, like sort of my own pattern piece that I can make sure I get that bottle shape. And again, I just like to use matching color threads because to me the quilting is sort of about adding another dimension more than it is about adding more color, because my work is pretty colorful to begin with. So just black stitching that kind of mirrors the shapes here, and then matching colors inside each of the circles and on the bottle. And this is an envelope opening on the back so basically once I had made that front part of the pillow, I sewed these two separate pieces slightly overlapping on so that you can take your pillow out and clean the case and that kind of thing. This last one is a little more standard patchwork in that, instead of a solid background with pieces of fabric sewn onto the top as an applique, it is just sort of basic squares and triangles pieced together. I did that first, and then squares of strips and sew those two components together, quilted it again with matching colored threads. It is funny, even now I still get a little nervous when I wash my quilted items, but they are pretty standard - I do a gentle cycle. You know this I just love, like very sort of simple geometric designs and seeing what I can do with them. So I mean this is ultimately as simple as it gets - stripes and squares - but I thought it would be kind of fun to just play with putting them together and seeing how they play off of each other. I love and admire more complex crazy shapes and that kind of thing but I always think it is fun to kind of just stick to the basics like stripes, squares, circles and see what you can do within that.