P.I.N. Pillow

The Kansas City Modern Quilt Guild is hosting a pin cushion swap with a bunch of other modern quilt guilds, including the Boston guild.  Me being me, i had to come up with a paper pieced pattern for my pincushion.  After some thinking, I created this very literal pin cushion design that I have dubbed P.I.N. Pillow.

I first made the pin cushion in some scraps for the swap, but then decided to make one for myself out of the new Denyse Schmidt Chicopee line.

This pincushion will be the one I'm including in the swap.  I usually stuff my pincushions with crushed walnut shells, but because this was for a swap, I just stuffed it with some bamboo stuffing.  My Chicopee cushion is stuffed with the walnut shells.

Here's the block before I sewed it together with the backing and stuffed it.  You could easily use this block in a quilt or other project, other than a pincushion.  You could also easily scale it up (or down) if you feel the pattern is too small for you.

You can purchase this pattern in my Craftsy shop here for instant download. 

Low Volume Pin Cushions

With some of my leftover 1" squares from the Modern She Made Swap pillow, I decided to make a couple of matching pincushions.

They're just simple postage stamp style pincushions, but I think they're cute.  One will be going to my MSMS partner and the other will either be kept by me or used for the MQG pincushion swap that the BMQG is participating in.  I have a plan for a different pincushion for that swap, if I have the time to execute on it. I hope I do because I think it will be really cool.

Log Cabin Pin Cushion

When I was making the log cabins for my Modern She Made Swap pillow, I made one log cabin in red and navy, but didn't think it fit with the rest of the colors.  I left it out of the finished project, but wanted to still use it somehow.  I decided that it should become a pincushion to go with the pillow.

I like to fill my pincushions with a mixture of cotton stuffing and walnut shells.  The walnut shells tend to give the pincushion some heft while the stuffing adds a nice fluff to the pincushion.

Here they are together.  You can see how the red and navy just didn't go with the other blocks, but how by itself, it looks cute.  

Happy New Year

I hope everyone had a great Christmas and New Year.  I took some time off of work and stepped away from the blog for a little while as well.  We were supposed to go to Mexico but the blizzard here in New England put an end to that plan and we weren't able to get out.  So, we made the best of it and did stuff around our area. 

I wanted to recap all of my accomplishments in 2010 as we move into 2011.  I think I was able to get a lot of projects accomplished last year.  It was certainly my most productive year of quilting to date.

I finished my Bento Box quilt!

I made this Blooming Nine Patch for my cousin's wedding. 

I made a bathroom curtain for our guest bathroom (no picture).

Made a baby blanket, bumper, and set of curtains for my friend's nursery.

Made my first bag using Pat Bravo's Milano kit. 

Finished my Wonderland quilt.

Finished my Figgy Pudding quilt.

Made a mini quilt for the NEMQG holiday mini quilt challenge.

Made my first pincushion for the NEMQG pincushion swap. 

I also made two camera straps for my sister and father for Christmas and made a few picnic roll-ups for my Mom for Christmas which I haven't uploaded a photo of to my computer yet. 

All in all, I think I had a great year quilting wise and look forward to accomplishing even more in 2011. 

NEMQG Pincushion Swap

On Saturday, at the NEMQG, we had a pincushion swap.  It was a "bring a pincushion, get a pincushion" swap. 

Here's the pincushion that I made for the swap.

I made it using the leftover scraps from the Carol Doak Radiant Star BOM.  All of the pieces that I had leftover from trimming the paper pieced blocks became this pincushion.  I filled it with crushed walnuts.  I loved it and didn't really want to give it away, but I did.

Here we are swapping pincushions.

And this is the pincushion that I received.  Isn't it cute?

 

And here are all of the pincushions.  I wish I could have taken them all back with me, but if I did that I'm guessing I wouldn't be welcome back to the group.  So, I resisted.