theo's pillow

When my friend Jordana had her son, Theo, I was a little stumped about what to make for him. Jordana is an excellent knitter and I knew she would whip up blankets and sweaters easily. I decided that a quilted gift was one of the few things I could make that she might not make herself.

I have quite a stash of fabric samples, swatches, and in some cases rolls, in my basement that are left over from mr.tiny. I dug through them and pulled out some favorites in a nice array of blues and got to work. When mr.tiny was still in business I spent a lot of time daydreaming about products we could develop out of the surplus fabric we had after each season was produced. If we had continued maybe this pillow would have been part of the collection.

For the most part making this pillow required only the most basic sewing, but one thing I found helpful was using a lightweight interfacing (or very thin scraps of fabric) to back the buildings before appliqueing them on to the background. For example, to make the building with the pitched roof I sewed a triangle of fabric to a rectangle of fabric to make the basic house shape. Then I sewed it to a liner with the right sides of the fabric facing together leaving the bottom open. When turned right side out all the edges are neatly folded under and all I had to do was sew it onto the background color...no tedious tucking and pinning necessary. I sewed on all the buildings first and then added the solid blue stripe at the bottom to finish it.