An improv cushion for Gran

Do you know what you get from paper piecing?  Scraps.  Lots and lots of scraps.  Last weekend I decided to crack open my full to bursting box of Noteworthy scraps and have a play around.  Once I started pulling scraps out, I knew I wanted to make something for my grandmother Heather (Gran to me).

This is basically improv piecing - I just started with a piece of fabric and kept adding bits, trimming it down to a regular shape as necessary, until I had a decent sized block.  You might be able to see that there are a couple of more deliberately pieced areas (the pink at the top and the bottom of the pillow), where I wanted to include some pink but all my scraps were too small to be able to add a single piece. This 16" square pillow is made up of four improv pieced blocks, stitched together and then trimmed down to square.

 

I wanted the quilting to contrast with the crazy and wonky piecing, so I quilted a reasonably dense cross-hatch grid (I marked at 1" intervals down each side of the quilt top and used a hera marker to mark each diagonal line before quilting).  The 50 weight cream cotton thread I used just melts into the fabrics, so that the texture is the main feature.

Both the backing and the binding are from the same fabric collection - I was able to use a single fat quarter for the backing, with a simple envelope style pillow closure.  I think I might need to get more of this bird on a wire print - it makes a really great binding.

This pillow will be in the mail to Gran this week - she lives in Auckland, otherwise I would deliver it personally.  Hopefully she likes it!

Linking up with:

and finish it up friday with crazy mom quilts.