Quilt Your City on Pillows

Out of wall space? How about making some quilted pillows?

I might not have thought of this, if I hadn't been asked. A neighbor saw my pandemic porch quilt show (the subject of my last several blog posts), and commissioned me to make four 18" pillows, including two with scenes from our town, South Pasadena, which is part of Los Angeles. We negotiated a price and a backing color - grey - and I was off. It took about two weeks, and here they are. 

The first one in the lineup above represents the town's Gold Line MTA Train crossing. For research, I took my family on a masked Christmas Day photo safari. Action photography is not my forte; it was surprisingly challenging to catch a shot of a train in mid-intersection. But I got a few.

I also photographed our town's iconic "walking man" statue, next to the station. My daughter did a little leap for me, and she provides scale for just how tall this guy is.

The photos helped me set the scene. 

I imported a walking man photo into my CorelDraw program, and traced it, to make the statue outline. Just for fun, the client and I decided to add a small person with the same profile striding in the opposite direction.

There are two coffee shops next to the tracks, so I created a blue table with coffee and pie in the corner. The small shiny black circles on the railroad crossing pole are tiny, vintage black plastic buttons. 

On the back flap, there's a departing train. 

The second scene that the clients requested was our town's 19th century watering trough. Most of the time, it looks like this.

But on Thursday afternoons and evenings, it's surrounded by a lively farmer's market. So I circled my trough with goodies. Here's how the piece looked flat. 

The ostrich is our town's mascot - 100 years ago, South Pas. was home to an eccentric tourist-trap ostrich farm. Historians say it put  us on the map. 

(The ostriches were not purple, I just did that for fun. The farm no longer exists, which is sad for our town's economy, but happy for the ostriches, who were forced to schlep the tourists around in large wooden carriages.)

Here's the scene as a pillow. 

And I added some more food fabrics to the back. 

The two other pillows that my clients requested were a swimming pool pillow - here it is before assembly...

...and then after the pillow was inserted. 

The clients got the idea from the swimming pool quilt I blogged about a while back, with a tutorial about how I gave the pools depth with sturdy fusible interfacing and reverse applique, HERE. 

Finally, they wanted a pillow with my tessellating coffee cups design. Before stuffing, it looked like this.

....And after stuffing: 

Showing this pillow on Facebook led to a discussion in which my candid friends agreed that these look less like coffee mugs with handles (my intention), than some kind of bird or alien heads. Whatever you think it looks like, if you want to make your own version, the pattern is in my "Quilts for Coffee Lovers" PDF booklet on etsy, HERE. 

Have you made quilted pillows?

Eat Chocolate, Drink Coffee. English Paper Piece the Trash into Holiday Decor

It is not an exaggeration to say that English Paper Piecing (EPP) is one of the most addictive quilt-related activities I've ever undertaken. It wasn't enough for me to do EPP with fabric, first to make quilts, and then to stitch polyhedra.

But then, a couple of years ago, after my DH caved to supermarket displays (always blame the DH!) and bought a bag of Lindt Truffles (no financial affiliation!) I found myself fascinated by the wrappers.  One thing led to another...at parties, I started following people around to collect their wrappers....and here are tutorials for two projects made from them. Both are sparkly, fun, and therefore perfect holiday decor!  These truffles come in so many colors, you can do Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanza color schemes, and more! 

PROJECT 1 Small Pentagon Bowl

Detailed directions are in my polyhedron book, but you can don't need it to follow this tutorial. You will need a regular pentagon shape. 

1. Cut out six cardstock pentagons. Mine are 1.75" high, from the middle of the base to the tip, a good size for this particular chocolate brand.

2. I'll break it to you gently: You must eat six chocolates: One for the base, five for the sides. It's your creative duty. (OK, you can share the burden with someone you love.) I was at Costco yesterday and one of the generous ladies was handing everybody 3 Lindt truffles! Pass her twice! 

3. Wrap each cardstock pentagon with a candy wrapper.

As you fold to the back, figure out where you can trim away extra.

Cut same-size pieces from more foil - I used a holiday coffee pouch and glue-sticked the pentagons to the backs. They don't wrap around.

Lay everything out. 

Zigzag the pieces together on the sewing machine. As my book explains in detail, I first go around the central piece,  attaching the sides; then sew up the seams between all side pieces. I used silver metallic thread in the top.... 

...and the bottom....

I put the inside of the foil coffee bag on the outside, on one panel. I think it creates a sort of spaceship effect. 

Wasn't that fun? If you're still have leftover wrappers, you can make....

BOWL II: Hand-sewn Hexagon & Pentagon Bowl

This bowl's a little bigger. This time, you have to drink a lot of coffee as well as consuming six chocolate truffles
The first step is to cut six cardstock pentagons, same size as the project above, 1.75" in height. Wrap each with a truffle wrapper. 

The back. Cut away excess. 

Instead of covering each of the backs with another foil piece,  I tried mashing down some of the backs neatly. (Don't iron, for gosh sakes, the wrapper will melt and attack you with toxic fumes!) Then I stitched a star in silver metallic thread, from the front, to hold everything down.

The smushed backs looked pretty good! 

For the center, you need a hexagon whose sides are the same length as the pentagon's sides, 1.25" in this case. Cut it from cardstock. 

I wrapped one side with a coffee bag piece cut a little larger than the hexagon, so I could bring the edges to the reverse side. 

And in the opening, I slid another coffee bag piece the same size as the hexagon. 

Laid out the pentagon pieces around the hexagon base, good side up. 

Unthread the sewing machine. Use an old needle. Set the machine for a long stitch, even a basting stitch. Send the central piece through the sewing machine, poking more-or-less equidistant holes all the way around. Do the same with the side pieces. 

Hand lace everything together with sturdy thread. I used upholstery thread. 

Hand stitching is a bit awkward. I tried lots of different stitches to see what I liked best. They all worked fine, a whipstitch, a lacing stitch, whatever you like. 

And it's done!

Backside. 

Side view.

But wait! There's more! More chocolate wrapper - and broccoli bag - projects are posted  here. My favorite of all is this hand and machine sewn dish on that page and in the photo below.  

It cuts the sweetness with nutritional information! The base and square pieces are from the bag that holds the candies. The shape is a partial truncated cuboctahedron, and it's another project from my polyhedron book, available on etsy, here, for immediate digital download, or in paperback from Amazon, here. 

Need Coffee & Batik Scraps

For the last two weeks (1, 2) I've been showing quilts inspired by my coffee obsession. Here's a third one. It's made entirely of batik scraps.

There's an imaginary pipeline that leads from green coffee beans, horizontal across the top,

...to brown beans, vertically running down. 

The lettering reads "Need Coffee." The cups (complete with eyes, to ward away the evil eye/bad coffee), beans, and letters are cut freehand. They're raw-edge appliquéd. 

For the bottom, I created a graduated strip set, Perhaps it represents foamed milk floating on coffee? (Or self-layering Jello?)

Embellished it with coffee-and-cream shaded buttons. (Milk molecules?)

Want to make your own version but need directions? Find them in Quilts for Coffee Lovers, here. For more adventures with batik scraps, start here.

P.S. I shared this link at Nina Marie Sayre's gorgeous art quilt blog. Her off-the-wall Friday project is a great way to share the week's creativity.

It's All About the Taste: Coffee Quilt Based on Research

Last week, I showed one of the quilts in my new ebook, Quilts for Coffee Lovers. Here's another: 

It's done in raw edge appliqué, using a machine zig-zag. The red lines are coffee stirrers, and there are buttons between the stirrers and in the four corners.

This is a research-based quilt. If you've ever been serious about making a good cup at home, and looked into the subject, you know the coffee snobs afficianados say that details matter. Like:

• water temperature
• timing of grind
• fineness of grid
• relative quantities of water and coffee
• timing of pour
• height from which the water is poured, no kidding
• and, of course, the gadget. The gadget makes a HUGE difference.

I learned all this about a year ago when our 15-year-old drip maker died. I did a lot of Internet research, then took a tasting class at a fragrant independent coffee shop, where we sampled the same coffee brewed by a half-dozen or so different devices. I was stunned by the varied outcomes.

In particular, I was stunned by how appallingly bad percolated coffee tasted.  Why did anyone in America drink coffee during the first half of the 20th century?

So for this quilt, I drew 6 of the most picturesque gadget choices that I could find in cyberspace. They include a Moka pot, a percolator, an Aeropress, a vacuum maker, a drip filter holder, and a French press. Here are the first four:

I also came up with 7 variables contributing (sometimes indirectly) to coffee triumph and failure:
 - Good Gadget
 - Good Coffee
 - Good Grind
 - Good Cup
 - Good Beans
 - Good Friends
 - Good Luck

Anyone who wants to make their own version can personalize it with their own 4 favorite devices, and their 4 favorite phrases. Perhaps the most important, imho:

What system did I end up with? I finally bought a Bodum Bistro burr grinder (about $100), the first grinder I'd owned in many years. And I bought a Bonavita drip coffeemaker (about $130). $230 is not cheap, but it would have been very easy to spend a whole lot more. My family is happy with the coffee since then - usually delicious - and after about a year, all the equipment is still working.

Sometimes, for just one cup, I use the Aeropress, a strange little device that my friend Sam gifted me, thanks Sam!

It makes the most reliably delicious single cup I've ever made at home, and it's not expensive at all, at around $30! (No financial affiliation with any of these products!)

What are your secrets to coffee success? Let me know. More information about my coffee quilts pattern book is here,