Quillows and Such-Developing a Theme

1. Decide if you want plain cotton, or warm soft fuzzy for the basic outer material you will be quilting. This is the first step of all quilting.

2. Quilting is the act of sandwiching material together in layers with thread. Either machine sewing through the layers or a simple thread looped through once and tied in various places will do the trick. My latest endeavors have been picking a fleece with a printed pattern, preferably a non-pill fleece. This printed pattern means I don't piece the fleece, I just use the print to quilt around and that becomes the quilting pattern of the sewing through on the solid color side. I found a fleece with pansies printed on it and so the actual pattern of the quilting is pansy shapes on the solid minkie side.

3. A quillow can be done with various patterns. After you are through making the quillow it becomes a quilt that folds into a pillow. In the ones I make I just make a pocket or pillow front sewn in the center of the bottom of the quilt-whatever size or width the quilt is and the pillow front is one third of that bottom of the quilt. This becomes what you fold the quilt into so it is centered at the bottom. It also becomes the place your recipient will put their feet. When you make the pillow pocket think about how the person will be sliding their feet into it and use the soft side on the inside of the pocket so they can go ewwwww ahhhhhh when they slide their feet into the pocket.

Well these two children are grown but still very much in my mind as their personalities were growing up. This one loves music so I found a fleece with Rock and Roll on it and it became quilt fun quilting around the guitars and musical notes with hearts and Lightning bolts. If you have a freemotion foot for your sewing machine you can do these easily. Quilting shows up very beautifully on solid color minkie. The second thing is finding sewing machine embroidery themes that match your theme. Janome has the flowers and birds and butterflies.... They are beautiful. Although I love hand embroidery the machine embroidery hand stitched onto the top of solid color minkie is beautiful.... at least I thought so. The pillow top then got a double pansie in the middle so she can put her feet in minkie but when it flips out it is a beautiful pansy pillow for her sofa.

This quillow is very simple twin size 1 piece batik cotton on one side and a different batik on the other side. The quillow pillow top is pieced on one side in a pattern that is used to quilt the quillow itself but rather simply. Again, the patterned pillow top is on the inside of the pocket so when you fold the quillow into the pillow square it flips the pocket out and that is your patterned pillowtop.

This one is twin, but the actual material used for the curtains is 6 pieces that are torn in strips so one half is the curtains and the other half will be a fullsize quilt of the same strips but a star pattern in each corner and one large star in the center of batiks. The quillow can be thrown on the top of the bed as a toss pillow and each star center and reverse side can show off the machine embroidery. What says more about a nature forest looking setting for birds, butterflies and flowers than batiks....????? What says more about love for your children and grandchildren than sewing and baking?

Asked to do Pugs on a motorcycle, I took the theme through the whole quillow and had theme do all sports. First I drew the base in paint and planned the size and number of squares and then ran with it.

Knowing it was the pugs doing things.... planned each of the squares and what they would do. Riding motorcycles was the theme given.... and this went to sports and relaxing and even jobs.... driving food trucks playing football, soccer... fishing and relaxing on the dock.