Hey, wait a second, if thought I was just sleeping on the job, you’re not correct
at all. This is actually a quilt shoved into a pillow. That’s right I mentioned the word
quillow in a few videos back and everyone said, Rob, you’ve got to show us how to
make a quillow. But you’ve got to make it cool and you’ve got to make it modern. So
check this out.
One of the keys to the quillow is obviously in the fold and the packaging. We all love
our packaging. So this is the quilt and I’m going to unpack it now. I’ll teach you how
to put it back together at the end of the video. And while I’m doing this, we are
using Michael Miller’s Cotton Couture. That’s their wonderful solid line. And I just absolutely
love it. The dark blue is called royal. The turquois is called lagoon. And our accent
fabric today is called limeade. So let me show you. I’m going to throw it right at
the camera there. Here it is. This is the one side, these are two sided project, right?
Everything counts on these. This is where the quilt was packed in to make the pillow.
And on the back you can see this is where I’ve gone nuts and really enjoyed the heck
out of my free motion machine quilting as well. So I’m going to show you. In the description
below we have a fantastic printable that will take you through all the steps and the measurements.
I need you to focus real quick. I’m going to show you how to cut these so you can get
them all out of 2 ½ yards of each of your two main fabrics. Let’s get started.
So here’s a great shot of the printable we have for you. As I said in that description
below. And of course MSQC has all the supplies you need so that link is there also. And hey
while we’re talking about the channel, why don’t you take a moment and hit the subscribe
button if you haven’t already. That’s probably long enough. Now let’s start talking
about cutting up this fabric. You have the 2 ½ yards as I said of our lagoon color and
of this wonderful blue which is called royal. Of the 2 ½ yards your first cut is going
to take as it was folded right off the bolt in the quilt shop, we’re going to take and
cut an 18 inch cut right off of here. Ok, so I’m just using my marks these 18 inches
and what I do to this color, I’m also doing to the dark blue, not to my accent color.
This will be set aside for using in our pillow later. So right now this 18 inch chunk and
this 18 inch chunk we’re just going to go ahead and set aside for later use. We’re
coming back to those. Now this is really, really important and I shouldn’t admit it
but I’ve accidentally screwed this one up a couple of times to myself. Watch, I’m
going to take my fabric. You have two yards left, right? Now what I want you to do is
we’re going to go ahead and fold it with our selvedges touching, not from the opposite
sides but this is the long side down. I need to fold it so it’s easy to cut. But we’re
only going to have one single cut of the sizes I’m about to tell you. Those are the sizes
behind me. So I shake this all loose like this. So that really now as I go across here
I have my 45. And now I’m going to start cutting off slices. I take off the selvedge.
We never use that in our quilt construction. And then, check this out, here’s the way
we’re going to make the rest of our pieces work. Cut yourself a two inch. And again one
strip, both colors. Two inch, three inch, we have a five inch, an eight inch and then
I’m calling this the leftovers. The leftovers are going to be roughly 23 inches. What you
need to do is make sure that the leftovers are the same size from both colors because
when you build your quillow. I should say, this is the quilt portion of the quillow,
we’re getting to the pillow later. When you build it and construct it, we are going
to basically make, check this out, this is really cool. Play a little peek-a-boo for
a second. So this is one side and now as I expose it you see here is the other side of
the quilt. Remember both sides really count in this. So you can see that the construction
is the same. And here it is up on the back wall. There’s a couple things I want you
to watch real careful. So here’s the entire layout. We have our eight inch of the body
color. We now have a five inch of the other color we’ll call it. This is that one inch
strip of the accent. So for the body construction of the quilt itself, you need six strips at
least at one inch by the length of your fabric. And then we’re going to have a two inch
of our body color. We have the three inch of the other color again. We have another
one inch of our accent. And this here represents the leftovers as I said about 23 inches. Now
you’re thinking to yourself, Rob that is the most odd looking construction you’ve
got here. Completely 72 inches long. What are these tails doing up here? Well once I’ve
built this and I’ve pressed all my seams open, I take rotary cutter and my ruler and
cut these tails off up here and I set them aside because they’re the first parts we’re
going to need in making our quilt top. So I want to really spend some time on that,
excuse me, I said quilt top, on the pillow construction of course. So I’m hoping this
makes sense and like I said, all of those instructions are right there. For the printable,
you’ve got a nice picture of how this works.
Let’s dive right into the construction of our pillowtop. Now reminder, this is going
to show also on both sides so watch my fingers. This here is the entire pillowtop including
all the fun little seams that you see, right? So let me show you how we did that. We started
back to those half yard or those 18 inch slices we took off of the dark blue. I actually would
like you to cut a 13 by 13 square. And of your light blue, you’re going to cut a 12
by 12 square. You’re going to use these trimmed off pieces you have right up here.
Right, these trims are going to at least be two sides of the 12 by 12 square of the lighter
blue. And that is going to look like this. So first we seam on all four sides. And I
like to just sew on. And then I come over and I press this open. This way I make sure
I have just enough. You could certainly trim it down if you wanted, make sure you do your
math correctly. I like to just go ahead and do it this way. And then I’ll just simply
take and trim this tail off like that. And then once the tail is cut off that’s when
I come back to my dark blue and I have my 13 inch square as you see here. And I have
stitched all the way as you can see. Here it is on this side. Here’s those seam allowances.
And then what you do is you take your ruler this is the way that my dear friend Jenny
Doan likes to make her half square triangles. That’s where we’re really going with this
but we have a little accent piece in. I’m just going to go ahead and cut across here,
diagonal to diagonal. I’m not moving my fabric, I’m just going to lift my ruler,
drop it down so I’m safe. Come over here nice and right handed, cut this just like
you see here. Now we get to go back to the ironing board and press this open. And we
get these magical new parts and pieces. And because we’re all Star Wars fans we’re
always pressing to the dark side. And as I build all four of these we’re going to reconstruct
to make the pillow front. Now while I’m pressing these I want you to think carefully.
The pillow front originally I did you saw had a solid on one side. Well that’s what
I thought I wanted but then I loved the way the pillow finished out so I put that on the
outside or the, the functioning part of the quilt before it was the pillow. I’m recommending
you make this twice for yourselves and make this both sides. Now what I’m going to go
ahead and do is walk you through reconstructing.
We wanted that blue diamond in the center with the fun limeade on the outside. So you
see how I’m just rotating these to fit just right. You can do it whatever you like with
them. You can make all kinds of fun designs. But this is what I did with mine. Once that
is constructed, then I’m going to go to the sewing machine and I’m going to stitch
here. I’m going to stitch here. And then I’ll press open and join all of those to
create the pillowtop. Let me show you what that looks like because it’s all done. I’ve
got one set aside right over here. Now this particular piece is getting near that 18 inches
we need. So like I said, originally I went ahead and sandwiched mine up with the royal
blue on the back. So this construction, we’re actually going right sides together with the
batting inside. This is not how I handle the quilt itself . I do the quilt itself as a
standard quilt construction. Then I bind it after I’ve trimmed it. This one we’re
going to lay these together here. Stitch around it. I need to have this trimmed down, right?
So what I’m really trying to say is take this piece first. This is our finished pillowtop.
Let’s cut this nice and clean with our rotary cutter. We want this to be as exact as possible.
So I’m going to take and get a little bit of this out of my way. Now I’m just going
to lay my ruler here because I need to be able to see my seam allowances all the way
around. Make sure you’re not getting any wrinkles in as you’re working through, right?
Are you already dreaming about how you’re going to quilt this? I think that’s one
of my favorite parts about being a quilt designer is about halfway through the construction
process I start to get really excited about how I’m going to machine quilt it. And that’s
actually some of the caffeine that pulls me through at the end. Every now and again because
I get a little distracted as you can probably tell that I would want to move onto something
else sooner than later. But at any rate. Here we go. Now you see we have gotten the wrong
side together there, ok? So now what I need to do, bring this just like this. Make sure
it’s as tidy as possible. Your batting will shift a little bit. And that’s one of the
major reasons I do this for the 18 pillow but not for the big quilt. Now we’re going
right sides together here. Now I’m going to use a quarter inch seam allowance and I’m
going to go 90% of the way around my pillow body here. Let’s go ahead and do this.
Ok, here we come right back in after stitching all of the way around that. And of course
you know I do all this live and you see I had a little bit of shifting because I didn’t
take the time to pin it. I was so excited I was going to show you what I was doing,
I neglected one of the most important steps. I should have pinned. Please do that at home.
Right? It’s ok. For today’s tutorial I will just trim it down. It will make sense.
We also have the opening we need. This is where we’re going to pull it right sides
back out. But before we do that, let’s make this thing fit a little bit better. And that’s
something you won’t need to do because you will pin it. This is one of those parenting
moments I’m having, right? Which is do what I say not what I do. Here we go. Now we’re
trimmed down, ok. I’m going to go ahead and start to slowly work this out. And that
bottom little edge, we can just quilt all of this as we’re done, and that bottom edge
will be the part that I catch in the seam allowance of putting the binding in on the
quilt top itself. I’m going to show you that in just a second. So this is one of the
construction methods. I again am recommending you have this design on both sides so you
have a pretty pillow front on both sides of your quilt. You will probably want to take
a moment and come inside with like a purple thing and punch those corners out. But what
I want to start talking about is the machine quilting at this point. You know that’s
one of my favorite steps.
Remember this is a multi-layer project, right? So let me show you how I’ve done that. With
the quilting, I just want to point this out, that remember you have two sides of both the
objects, both the pillow and the quilt itself. So there’s a couple of things. I enjoyed
having this medallion to work in with the free motion machine quilting . I was thinking
about what that was going to do to the other side as well. The pillow top, as you see here,
basically was all quilted at one time before it was attached to the quilt. And for the
quilt, a couple of the tricks I’ve used. One is I used the exact same thread in the
bobbin as well as in the top of the machine. And the reason why is I wanted it to really
show my quilting on one side. But if I had any tension issues or any thread problems
or anything I wanted to be able to hide it on the other side because every now and again,
I personally need to hide some stuff. We’ll just say it that way, right? So this was really
fun to free motion machine quilt. I have all this wonderful wide open space. But I wanted
it to show off and be able to hide. And then the other thing happens with most quillows,
right? Is that when you’re quilting you would normally stitch the whole pillow down
on the sides and the bottom. And that’s going to leave, excuse me for saying it, but
in this quilt it would be these terrible big straight lines that I didn’t account for
in the rest of the machine quilting. So if you look real close, right here, and oh my
goodness there’s a thread right there, and right here and a couple other spots that I
don’t even see right now, those are where I’ve actually tacked down the pillow top.
Let me show you this one more time. So to complete what I really did is after I machine
quilted all of the quilt top itself, and I did that like I said a couple of time, standard
construction, trimmed it down, put the binding on. As I was putting the binding on I took
my quilt, er my pillow top and I basically got it so that it was able to be caught up
down here in the binding itself. Once it was secured in the binding, I came up to the middle
points and I tacked with my machine, forward, reverse, forward, reverse, maybe about six
stitches in each direction. And then again up here at the top so that technically it’s
open here. Most quillows are stitched here. And of course you can do that, just plan for
it in your machine quilting, right?
And now the most important part of all quillow demonstrations, how do we get it back to look
like a pillow, right? So you start on the side without the pillow top itself. Then you’re
going to take and you’re going to fold it into basically thirds . But what I’m looking
for is the edge right here of that pillow. Same on the other side, right? And from this
point on you want to turn that pillow top, let me just adjust this a little bit so that
it will be easier later for me. Going to get that a little more tidy there. Now what we
want to do is we want to take our pillow top and turn it basically inside out. And that’s
why I keep saying that you have a two surface design area on your pillow, see? If I would
have used that other same patchwork, it would have been really cool on both sides there.
Now once that’s done take your quilt itself and you’re going to kind of fold it into
thirds this way. So I’m bringing it down to that edge, and if it’s getting a little
wide, just tuck it in. Actually my construction makes putting it away very, very easy. Fold
it again this way, right? And now all of that is going to get flip, flopped and folded one
more time into the pillow itself. But because we have these gaps it makes it much easier
to reach your hands in and get it nice and organized. All right there it is, all fancy
and folded up. And us quilt makers absolutely love to hide our quilts and our quilt designs
all around places in our life. This one will stash nicely in the backseat of your car or
on the couch. No one will even see the quilt coming right at them. But as you know I read
all these comments. That’s where I got this awesome idea. Keep that feedback coming. We
appreciate you and we’ll see you next time here at Man Sewing.