Pleated Boxes Pillow

The Indy Modern Quilt Guild had a challenge a few meetings ago where we each brought in a fat quarter in one of three colors, orange, yellow or aqua. We then tore them into strips and were asked to make something with whatever fabric we took.

So, that was several months ago. You wanna know how often I’d thought about these strips? Maybe once.

Until I saw the cute baby quilt whipped up by Tisha in these fabrics. It was so awesome! I knew I needed to revisit my fabrics again.

So happy I did!

To make the pleated boxes pillow, I started off sewing the fabric strips into a stacked books quilt block, and then I sliced, and sliced again into 3″ squares. I took the most colorful squares, and interspersed them with all-white squares, for a total of four columns of 7 blocks each.

I then cut a 3″ strip (the fabric rows that are gathered below) and used it to join the columns. I borrowed the gathered idea from a technique I used making a dress last summer. You just iron messy pleats into the fabric, then sew straight lines to keep the gathers in place. The back is an envelope pillow back, my favorite way to make pillows.

It was really liberating to jump right in and stitch up something without knowing the end result. I keep thinking there is some metaphor for life in there. 🙂

This pillow is listed in my Etsy shop.