Sour Candy Cushion

I made this cushion for round 8 of the X-Factor Pillow Swap. The premise of this swap is that each round, you make a cushion based around a theme, and send a photo to the group admin, who posts it to the group (so you don't know who made which cushion). After the deadline for entries has passed, everyone ranks the entries in order of preference, and the person whose cushion got the most votes gets their first choice, the person whose cushion got the second most votes gets their first choice (if it's still available), and so on.

The theme for this round was log cabins and text. After the last round, which was low volume, I wanted to do something really different, despite the temptation to use a low volume text fabric.

For my cushion, I used the black text print from Carolyn Friedlander's Architextures lines with a handful of prints from Alison Glass's Lucky Penny collection. I really like how the colours of the Lucky Penny fabrics are slightly clashy and how they really pop against the black text print. The design is super simple - instead of making a log cabin in the traditional way, I simply made four quarter log cabins, by starting with a central square and then only adding "logs" to two of the sides. Since these blocks weren't too big, I simply pieced them, but if you wanted greater accuracy, foundation paper piecing would work brilliantly (but more slowly).

For the quilting, I did simple straight line cross hatch grid - it gives lovely texture to the cushion without distracting from the piecing. I used Aurifil 50 weight thread in colour #1246 - a very dark charcol grey, and as usual, I was delighted with how it just blended into the top. I don't know if anyone else has had this experience, but sometimes I find very dark black or grey threads to have a different texture to lighter threads, and sometimes they seem to tangle more easily. Not so in this case, which made hand stitching the binding down with the same Aurifil thread a dream.

The back of the cushion is made using a drill fabric from Spotlight, designed by Austrlian designers Prints Charming. It's such a fun print - I wish I made more of it! Of course, I used my covered zipper cushion back

method - it really is speedy and nice and neat. I posted my cushion off to my partner this afternoon - I hope she likes it!