cloth: lumbar pillow #1 in progress

I’d been admiring the projects of the weekend quilter on Instagram, and last week I spied her book at the public library. Score!                  

Also I’d been searching images and quilt patterns to sew a lumbar pillow, and I found one I loved in my new public library checkout. 

I played with a color combination of Kona medium pink and light peach, but didn’t care for it in combination with the Cloud 9 mustard solid I had. And so I found a cantaloupe and dark pink to instead stitch squares to snowball into the rectangular strips for a lumbar pillow that I decided to gift to a grandniece. In sewing the directions, I misunderstood or maybe the directions in the book are just wrong. I drew a line bisecting the squares to “snowball” onto my strips, and then sewed a 1/4" seam on either side of the line (to use the leftover half-square triangles into coasters_.

After trimming the half square triangle off the strip, I then had to slice a 1/2" along with the dogears off the strip to square up the rectangle. 

 

In hindsight, I should have made the bisecting line of the 5 1/2" and 4" squares the bottom stitch line, drawn another 1/4" seam to be the line to cut off the fabric and sewn another 1/4" seam above that cut line in order to use the cut-off triangles as half-square triangles into another project of coasters. I went ahead and just sewed the smaller rectangle strips together.

I rather love the colors of this abstract-patterned pillow and hope a little girl will like it too. Tomorrow I'll find a utility fabric like muslin on which to layer with batting and quilt the top, use more utility fabric to sew a pillow insert, and do I then make the back of this pillow cover unquilted? I guess I'll know after I've quilted the top.