I made a template for the two peels on the loving kindness wallhanging, and- well, here's what happened. I appliqued them, I enjoyed it, and I was bingewatching Nurse Jackie and desperately needed some hand work to look at during the gory parts, so I grabbed some yellow and some blue and made one of these squares.
Nurse Jackie has seven seasons.
I decided to try two layers of batting and chose, from my tons of batting scraps, an anonymous 100% cotton. You can see here the depth it gave to the (minimal) quilting, which I really like.
Last night I spent a very long time creating the pillow insert out of fabric and batting scraps, as well as some home dec weight fabric that I bought not realizing that it wasn't quilting cotton. I used that fabric in the Gorilla quilt and it being a different weight doesn't stand out at all, but I probably won't mix it again, so it became the sturdy outside of the pillow form.
I had a batting bag and rubbermaid bin of scraps. It contained little actual fabric scraps, ends of threads that are too short to reuse, bits of yarn too short to do anything with, and lots of fabric sandwiches that have been cut away from the edges of a finished quilt. The fabric sandwiches I sliced to bits using my old partially-retired rotary cutter, because I don't mind the blade dulling from all the batting. Oh, and there were also those tangles of yarn that you cut from the edges of fabric after you prewash it - those are the best, along with the yarn. Wool is so springy.
I used an envelope pillow tutorial from crazymomquilts that worked well. I grokked the spirit of the deal and then proceeded to wing it, and next time I will definitely have less overlap in the two back panels. It was way past bedtime last night, and my husband was watching me try to cram the finished pillow form into the cover. He watched for a while, and then said, "We will never wash it." Which is, word-for-word, exactly what I was thinking.
The back is (mostly - the hidden part may have its secrets) this awesome batik I got at the LQS with my birthday gift certificate. While it looks like it may match the front pretty well, ehh, it really doesn't. It's not garishly different, but yeah. Don't look too closely.
It was deeply satisfying to use up so many scraps, and this thing is dense as a brick and about as heavy. I could see more scrap-stuffed pillows being on the horizon.
Linking up with Finish It Up Friday. Happy crafting!