While I’m waiting for my copy of Edyta Sitar’s Pillow Talk book, I decided to buy and download the full quilt pattern from her website, which also includes the 18″ square pillow.
The pattern is easy to follow — you appliqué a circle to a square of fabric, then sew the squares together to make a pillow or, in case you can’t stop, an entire quilt!
This was my first experience with appliqué and my first time binding a pillow.
You can fuse and then machine stitch the circles but I chose to hand baste the circles around freezer paper bases. I love having some hand work to do while I watch videos or listen to podcasts, and making these little circles was a real pleasure. it takes me about 30 seconds to baste one and they pile up nicely after an evening’s entertainment.
Over the last week and half I’ve made three versions of this pillow: in blue and whites, in green and in reds.
My first pillow was the blue and white one. I fussy cut lots of circles and auditioned them together, I ended up removing those that were too turquoise, and kept the grounding colour navy. I used all kinds of scraps of low volume fabrics for the background squares and arranged them quite randomly. For this quilt I machine appliquéd the circles to the background squares at first but didn’t really like the final effect on the paler circles, so I started hand appliquéing. I loved this!
My second pillow was the green one. For this pillow I again cut fairly random fabrics. But this one is hand done, except for the final piecing of the squares into the pillow front. Then, after stitching near the ditch to secure everything to the batting, I hand quilted (for the first time!) little green circles around each circle. This is so much fun!
My third pillow was the red one. For this one I consciously arranged the fabrics into a diagonal gradation of value, from dark red at the top left to pale corals at the bottom right.