The One Where I Finished Early

For the Love of Solids swap big item [and little item]...Finished!

All I had left to finish on my pillow was the binding, but I had put it off for a few days because I'm just not one of those people who enjoys it. In my mind, there is nothing creative about that part, and that's what I really like about quilting. 

Anyways, I worked on my machine binding skills, or lack thereof. I like machine binding pillows because they get thrown around a lot and washed a lot, so I want to make sure the stitching is really secure. As you can see, I use binder clips when ironing to hold the binding down. 

I didn't do too bad! I had a couple spots that I had to go back, but this was a good stretch of binding.

 Also interesting is that I planned for this pillow to be 20" square. But it's not. I guess with all those finicky seams that I was having trouble with all those tiny measurements that were off all added up, so one side finished at 18.5". So the 20" pillow form for this picture looks a little funny, because there's space at the top and bottom.

So I turned it sideways! And while I think that the actual pillow shape looks better when laying this way, I had always planned for the design to be vertical, so I'm not sure how I feel about it. Obviously, it is up to my partner as to how the pillow will be displayed.

And here's the back. I didn't have it in me to fight with a zipper after fighting with piecing the top, so I just went for a simple envelope closure with the top piece quilted for durability and the bottom piece doubled up.

And while I'm still in the binding spirit I'll be binding my Tangerine Tango challenge piece later today too. So that way tomorrow I can do fun things ;)

Go check out all the other modern finishes linked up at Megan's today. I like grabbing a mug of tea/coffee and some Girl Scout cookies and browsing through other people's projects!