On the 8th Day of the Destashification Christmas, me needles gave to me….

Large Quilted Pillows

Two large feather quilted pillows.

The Stash contained some rather expensive home decor fabric remnants in the color needed.

The “crinkly” bronze/gold polyester was marked “Dry Clean Only”, so into the washer it went!

The recipient has 4 children and pillows designed for the family room need to be washable.  The fabric washed and machine dried beautifully!

The pattern for the feathered double wreath can be found at Forest Quilting.  It was enlarged from the 10″ square pattern to a 20″ size for this 26″ pillow (with a 3″ flange).  I added the center grid to the pattern.

Enlarged Design and Saral Transfer Paper

The more ornate feathered heart was also enlarged to approximately 20″ square.

The fabric was placed on a large table.  The enlarged design pinned (OK, taped) to it and the transfer paper placed between (color side down).

Tracing the design lines transferred the design to the fabric.

Fusible Fleece was then ironed to the back of the fabric and the design quilted.

Dark green hand quilting thread was used to stitch the patterns.

Missing Feather

As careful as I was to make sure I transferred the entire pattern – a few feathers came up missing!

A long time ago, I learned the hard lesson that retracing never really aligns correctly, so had to improvise another method.

I cut out the missing feather and enough of the adjacent feathers to be able to align it.

Aligning the missing feather for tracing

Then traced around the cut out feather with a disappearing ink fabric pen (after testing it on a scrap of the pillow fabric – to make sure it would truly disappear!)

The steps outlined in the Flanged Pillows with Frustration Free Zipper Tutorial were followed for the zipper and pillow back – with one exception:  these pillows were lined for extra stability.

Detail of Feathered Heart

The pillows are quite large.  They are stuffed with a 26″ square polyfill pillow form.  With their 3″ flanges, the pillows are 32″ square.

They are intended for use as floor pillows – with the full knowledge that they will be used to hold dinner plates, cereal bowls and the occasional (rare) math book.

So, being washable was a must.

Detail of Feathered Wreath

I would love to stitch motifs like these on silk dupioni – the stitch definition would be more pronounced – but then the pillows could not be used to hold those dinner plates!