Purple Crazy Pillow
Crazy-quilt-inspired sampler pillow - made for my grandmother, whose favourite colour is purple. In retrospect, it was a bad idea to photograph this against a black background.
I stitched the patchwork top together in the summer of 2002 as a sampler, and I always imagined it would eventually be a gift for my grandmother because of the colours. It sat in a box for years, until May 2011 when I finally made it into a quilt-pillow.
The patchwork design was inspired by a quilt from this book which I found on sale years and years ago but still have because it has such beautiful quilts in it.
Some close-ups. The buttons in photos 1, 2 and 6 are made of shells, and in photo 2 there is a scarab beetle bead. Basically this was an excuse to use some of the neat stuff I've been collecting over the years! I really enjoyed spending time with the buttons and beads.
I began quilting from the centre, working outwards. I chose to use spirals to contrast the angular geometries of the patchwork.
I bought this mauve quilting thread in 2002 and am finally using it!!
After the hand-quilting was done I added two lines of machine-stitching for a border. The white pencil-crayon line is going to be the stitching line for when I add the pillow-case backing.
I played around with my button collection until I was happy with the balance of colours. Then I taped the buttons to a paper-diagram so I could work on the project over several days without losing the placements.
The finished quilt top.
The back, showing the quilting and beading stitches. The thick mauve line is embroidery thread - one of the fabrics started to tear while I did the quilting, so I mended it with some embroidery thread to look like it was part of the pattern.