A Christmas Patchwork Pillow

In the middle of doing a whole lot of quilting for others this month, I was able to whip up this patchwork pillow for myself.  My house just needed a tiny bit more red and green in our upstairs living room, and besides that, all of my current pillows have been taken a beating.  Time for a new, fresh one!

As you can see, I’m not really an over-the-top-Christmas-decorations kind of girl.  I have a Christmas pennant banner, our tree, one Christmas quilt and now a cute red and green pillow!  Out of the photo there is a nativity set and some snowflakes hanging in our entry way. 

Last month I did a charm swap with Jennifer from Ellison Lane and she sent me some reds and greens- which is what gave me the idea for this pillow.  Swaps are such a fun way to get variety in your stash or your scrap bins!

So this pillow is 16” x 16”.  I used some of Jennifer’s charm squares and added some of my own red and green scraps cut to 2.5” squares.

I sewed them together into an 8 x 8 grid, basted this to a bit of batting and did some straight line quilting. 

On the back I used a fun dot print (Mingle by Monaluna for Robert Kaufman) and an envelope style closure – fast and easy!

I like to add binding to my quilted pillows – it works as a frame of sorts.  I think it just has a nice, finished look to it.  I fell in love with this green stripe but didn’t have enough width-of-fabric strips to go all the way around the pillow.  I had to piece together like 5 or 6 shorter strips to get enough for the binding.  That just shows to what length I’m willing to go to for a binding that I love.  Haha…

I know I’ve said it before, but I love quick quilting projects – especially ones that I get to use in my home and enjoy immediately.  I’ll be a bit sad when the pillow gets put away with all of the other Christmas décor!

Oh, and if you looked really closely at the photo of our living room you might have noticed our elf, Bernard all tucked in cozy for a nap.  It took the kids all day to find him and when they did they were insulted that he was laying down on the job.  How can he possibly see how good we are being if he’s sleeping like that???

linking up to Crazy Mom Quilts Finish it up Friday