Playful Pillows with Island Batik

The May challenge in the Island Batik Ambassador program was to create a Playful Pillow.

When I received my Ambassador Box earlier this year I received this colorful fat eight bundle of Southern Blooms, there were 30 different fabrics in the bundle, including yardage of Grass-Light Lagoon.

This color combination reminded me of a meadow filled with wildflowers. In order to get all the fabrics into one pillow, I decided to make my first ever Modern Hexies project.

Here are a few of the fabrics laid out. There are a lot of flowers, butterflies, vegetation, together with blenders in this beautiful batik.

I was on vacation most of May, and needed to work on my project to make the deadline. The first step was to thread baste 2" hexagons. There are hexagons made of all the 30 different fabrics in this picture, but that was not enough. I ended up making nine more when I had decided on the final layout.

In order to make the pillow even more playful I decided to make a colorful, scrappy binding from a selection of the fabrics.

Since I didn't have a walking foot for my traveling sewing machine, this was as far I could get in my Modern Hexies project. I took a lot of pictures so I could recreate the design when I got home.

This is the stage where the hexies are glued down, ready for quilting. I used Hobbs Thermore batting and Aurifil 50wt thread for the quilting, variegated green/neutral 4653 on top and white 2024 in the bobbin.

A detailed picture of the quilting.

Here is the finished product, my Butterflies Among Wildflowers pillow. I love how the sunlight in the late afternoon highlights the Modern Hexies!

I took another picture this morning in overcast weather, and that gave me a completely different result, very flat and hardly any structure at all.

The back of the pillow with a hidden zipper. I used this tutorial for inserting the zipper, with a few modifications. I used a 20" pillow insert, but I wanted an extra puffy pillow so the pillow cover was cut to 19" square. Two pieces of butterfly fabric were sewn together to form the zip flap.

This is how the zipper is installed, completely hidden by the flap.

The new Modern Hexies pillow for my sofa is looking good!

The fabrics, thread and batting that was used for making this project was given to me by Island Batik. One of the biggest joys of being an Island Batik Ambassador is to get to play with the fabrics they send me.