Felt Flowers Pillow

January 2011

I had such fun and success in making the Christmas tree pillow with the felt circles that I thought ... what else could I do with felt circles?? And then I remembered Don't Look Now!'s applique pillows!

I could simply substitute felt circle flowers for the appliques!

I did some weird-o cross-hatch quilting for the background. I'm not sure exactly what I had in mind but it came out this way. Weird.

I had some leftover green bias strips that I made into narrow bias tubes for the stems. I curved the stems of my flowers instead of keeping them straight and appliqued some narrow leaves onto the stems.

Then came the flowers! Just like in the Christmas tree pillow, I tightly packed the circles together, completely filling in a circle traced onto the background fabric. Each felt circle was tacked at the center.

The idea of putting prairie points along the outside came to me ... to duplicate the colors of the flowers!

So, I made a messload of prairie points.

Instead of using a single color for the piping/cording around the edge of the pillow, I used the same colors in a strip set to make multi-colored bias binding.

I want to end this page with a small rant: for the most part, whenever I see throw pillows, they almost ALWAYS have dog ear corners! That simply drives me NUTS! There is just no reason, whatsoever, to have a sway-backed pillow with pointy little dog ear corners!

Those dog ears are created because the pattern has right angle corners. The pillow insert (or stuffing) will not fill out those corners correctly.

The solution is very, very simple!

On the pattern piece, you need to CORRECT the corner seam line as shown by the drawing. At EACH corner, mark a dot at 3/4" in from the adjacent seamlines. Then, find the mid-point of each seamline. Take your French curve ruler and connect the 3/4" dot and the corresponding midpoint. Draw a NEW curving seamline. Re-draw the seam allowance at the corner. (Eventhough only one corner is shown with the correction, *all* corners need done.)

What you now have is a curving corner. It looks wrong, doesn't it? But it WORKS. When you put the pillow insert into the pillow cover (or stuff it with filling), the resultant corners will *BE* a nice right angle corner ... *no sway back edges or pointy dog ear corners*!

Using the corrected pattern, you will find that your corners will be exactly square when you turn the pillow right side out. End of rant. :-)

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