Sometimes I feel like I live in a strange middle ground in the sewing community. I sew pretty much all of my clothes, but I also really enjoy quilting. It’s a funny thing because I know a lot of garment sewists either strongly fear or strongly dislike quilting, and a lot of people who quilt are capital Q Quilters who are very skilled at quilts but don’t really sew clothes. I’m not going to call myself a Quilter or claim to have the precision and attention to detail that most quilters have, but I do really enjoy quilting and using piecing techniques. The project I’m going to show you today uses foundation paper piecing, which is the same process used to make my massive elephant quilt! I also used the exact same pool of scraps to make this as I did for the border of the elephant. This is one block of the Glimmering quilt pattern by Briar Hill, turned into a pillow case!
I started this thing more than two years ago. It was the first FPP (foundation paper piecing) project I started after I finally understood how it was supposed to work during a workshop with Andrea at Patch. I ambitiously printed out enough templates for 6 blocks of the Glimmering pattern, thinking I’d make at least the throw-sized quilt and would print out more templates once I finished the first set. I sewed maybe 4 templates (out of the ~20 required for each block) and then got bored and put it in a WIP (work in progress) bin and then didn’t touch it again for two years. Somewhere along the way I had a bit of guilt and a dawning sense of reality that made me purchase a pillow form that was the same size as one finished block. I think I recognized that I was never going to actually sew 8 blocks for a throw quilt, let alone 24 for a full-sized quilt. But then the pillow form haunted me. It took up space, I kept having to move it out of the way to get other supplies for other projects. The templates I’d sewn stared down at me from the clear plastic bin they were living in. I finally got to the point last week where I just wanted the pillow form to no longer live on the floor in the craft room/office. I was ready to suck it up and just finish this block so it could become a household item we’d actually get to use and appreciate. However long it took, I’d do it, and I would be done with feeling guilty.
Turns out, sewing an entire elephant using FPP makes you WAY WAY WAY faster at FPP. Compared to how long it took me to do the first four templates, I think I did the remaining 16 in half the amount of time. It even made me consider actually doing a full quilt using this pattern. Even looking at the initial sewing I’d done, my technique has not only gotten faster, but much more accurate. If you see any points that aren’t lining up, they’re likely due to sloppy sewing during the first batch of sewing two years ago. Maybe I will eventually do a full quilt using this pattern, because it’s EXCELLENT at using up small scraps. For FPP, grainline is completely irrelevant because the paper stabilizes the fabric. You don’t have to pre-cut any pieces besides the background fabric, and you just find a scrap that will fit the next segment of sewing on it, sew it, trim it, and then you’re done. I have tons more scraps left in this colour palette, so maybe eventually I will do a full quilt and use them up. I sort my quilting cotton scraps into two main bins: warm colours, and cool colours. It’s the appropriate level of organization for how my brain works and the way I use scraps. This is obviously made from the warm colours, but I did also find 4-5 templates sewn up from the cool palette so I’m going to finish that as well and probably make it into another pillow to gift.
As for the remaining printed out templates, I recycled them. I’ve been in the mood lately to let projects go if I don’t feel like sewing them. I’ve been thinking a lot about the Sunk Cost Fallacy. In this case, the sunk cost was low; all I’d done was print out templates. I hadn’t even spent time cutting them out. And yes, I did plan to do the quilt project, but now I don’t want to. So I’m letting it go. I am working on letting fewer Planned Projects haunt me. I don’t want my hobby to have guilt! It’s also a motivating force behind sewing my stash. I want it to be smaller so I can let go of the sense of looming projects I *need* to sew. Once my stash is smaller, I plan to only buy fabric for a specific pattern/project. I’m in a good place now with that, since I have depleted certain categories of my stash (linen and rayon, so far). I know if I have a project that I want to sew in a linen, I can buy a cut of linen because I don’t have anything in my stash. I’m also trying to avoid pre-cutting things for future patterns. Sometimes the size I cut might not fit by the time I get around to sewing it, or sometimes I don’t want to sew that pattern anymore. Then I really have a sunk cost, since I’ve cut up a fabric I could’ve used for something else. Bulk cutting isn’t fun to me anyway, since I like a variety of tasks. Trimming paper, assembling the PDF, cutting out the pattern, cutting the fabric, and then sewing right away works better for my brain that doing a whole bunch of similar tasks in a row. Has anyone else had a shift in their sewing practice? I’m curious to hear about it. It’s funny to think that increased self-awareness can affect something like a hobby so significantly.
Enough musing, back to the pillow! In order to turn it into a pillow case, I cut two pieces of fabric the same size as the front block and then finished one edge of each by folding it over twice by 1/2″ and then stitching it down. I laid these two pieces on top of the block, right sides facing, and overlapped the two finished edges by ~3″. I then trimmed the excess length from the other end of each piece. This created waste but I wasn’t in the mood to actually measure and calculate anything, so I just went with it. I used this cheetah print quilting cotton than I had a big chunk of in my scraps, and I think it complements the pinks of the front nicely. 3″ was a good overlap, because you’ll see below that the inside doesn’t peek out at all. I think I might go for 4″ next time, just for a bit more security. I sewed around all four edges of the pillow case at 1/4″ because that was the quilting block seam allowance and I didn’t want to make it too small for the 18″x18″ pillow form I bought. For the other cool palette pillow, I think I’ll make the background pieces a little bigger so I can use a 1/2″ seam allowance along the outside edge.
And there she is! I love that with this project, just like the elephant, I can see remnants of all kinds of past projects within it. It’s comforting! If you’re curious about FPP, I’ve done a few stories that I highlighted on my Instagram. Tell me about your sewing practice. Do you batch cut? Do you have project guilt? Stash guilt? Do you dabble in quilting, or only sew garments?
