Anne’s Creative Threads

This week I started teaching a course at my local club on how to make a quillow. If you have never heard of a quillow before, a quillow is a small quilt that folds into a pillow. Before starting the course I needed to make another sample and rewrite my notes, so over the last few weeks, aside from my art quilt work, I have been making up my own quillow.

I bought some rather nice cat print fabric from the local fabric shop in town to use as the main feature fabric and then raided my fabric stash for the rest. The print fabric has lots of different cats in brown, black and grey on a light brown background so it was easy to find coordinating materials from amongst my stash of fabrics that I use for landscape quilts and geckos.

The quilt and pillow top is constructed from 8 inch ‘crazy’ foundation log cabin blocks which I printed out from Electric Quilt. The central patch is quite large so I was able to cut a square featuring a cat for the center of each block. I then applied strips of fabric around the central block to complete the square. I have included detailed instructions of how I made the foundation pieced log cabin blocks and completed the quillow on my web site  AnneMaundrellDesigns.com in a new section entitled ‘Tips and Tutorials’. In time I hope to expand this section and include  lessons covering more different techniques and processes.

Brown is really one of my least favourite colours, but since I have been making art quilts I have accumulated a large collection of lovely batiks and blenders in all sorts of lovely shades and tints. I have grown to like using these colours a lot more and I was happy with the way the blocks turned out. I used a pale buttery yellow for the sashing to set off the blocks and this also brightened up the quilt a bit.

I used more of the cat print fabric for the outer border, being careful to remember to make sure everything was the right way up and the cats weren’t standing on their heads. The pillow top was made in the same way except that round the outside I used small strips of fabric sewn together in random order to make up the border with a square in each corner.

For the quilting I quilted in the ditch around the first row of the log cabin and around the outside edges of each quilt and the borders. The first time I made this quilt I didn’t do any more quilting but this time I wanted to practice my free motion quilting so quilted all around the blocks using a loop design and variegated cotton thread.

If you’re curious to see how the quilt turns into a pillow and becomes a quillow, chack out my web site for more photos: Anne Maundrell Designs