Patriotic Pillows on the Porch

The last couple of weeks, I've been making red, white and blue pillows to decorate our porch for our July 4th holiday barbecue.  The weather here is rainy and cool, but we managed to cook a few hamburgers and hot dogs yesterday in between showers.



This pillow-making frenzy all started with the pillow below.  When I went to English Paper Piecing Addiction Group at Back Door Quilts a couple of weeks ago, my friend Michele brought a pillow in similar to this.  It is made of 2 1/2" unfinished squares and is quilted by hand with big stitch using embroidery floss.  I know a lot of us have floss left over from our cross stitch days.  I've seen lots of pillows using the 2 1/2" squares, but the big stitch made each square puff up a bit, and the hand work was fun to do while sitting out on the porch.  Back Door made up kits for both the stand alone pillow tops and another kit with the backing added.  I bought a couple of kits for the pillow top to get a variety of squares and then added to it from my patriotic fabric stash.  

I saw this hexagon pillow on Pinterest and decided I'd make one.  I found a tutorial on line that said to arrange your hexagons in a pleasing manner.  Well, that's all well and good, but they have to line up so that when you sew both horizontally and through the diagonal you catch all of the points.  I'm writing a tutorial and taking photos, and I'll post it in a few days.  This is a great way to have a hexagon pillow without sewing all of the hexies together by hand.

Here is another hexagon pillow that I designed.  There is no sewing by hand on this pillow either.  The flag would have shown better if I'd bordered it and used a larger pillow insert, but I think you can still tell what it is.

This is what I did with the second kit of 2 1/2" squares of Patriotic fabric.  I stitched in the ditch on this one.   I've quilted all of these pillows using some of my batting scraps and then muslin on back.  I think the quilting just makes the pillow more sturdy and gives it a nicer finish.   They are all finished off with an envelope back.  I'll do a tutorial on that at some point as well.  

I embroidered the center of the pillow above.  I took an embroidery class at Back Door a couple of months ago to learn some new stitches and to learn the correct way of doing some that I'd done for years.  The added bonus was when I learned how to shade my embroidery with crayons.  I'll have to post about that as well.

Below is my quilt as you go Patriotic table topper centerpiece made from my tutorial.  You can find it here.  

I hope you are finding some time to stitch today.

Thanks for stopping by for a visit.

Happy Independence Day!