Sherbet Pips Quillow

It's official, I'm in love with Bella's finished Christening Gift Quillow! I now see absolutely no reason why all quilts should not have the hidden cushion pocket and fold away so fabulously!

I followed the tutorial over at A Cuppa and a Catch Up, so if i refer to particular 'steps' you may get clarification from there!

Here is the back of the cushion panel (I'll be refering back to this block later!)

And this is the front, which gets quilted in step 2.

It was a gloriously sunny day today, to such an extent that the pictures even have glare! My photographic skills really are terrible - sorry!

I devised my own block design so that Bella would be able to appreciate the fun prints, each block was 16" square.

Please excuse my barren wasteland of a garden!

And for the back I have repurposed a pretty Debenhams duvet cover.

The quilting is a bit neanderthol with a wonky squares design, because...

The construction of the quillow in this instance is such that you baste your quilt top and batting together and cut to size. You then cut your backing fabric to the same size, pin right sides together with your quilt top, sew around the edge leaving a turning hole, turn it through and then stitch round the edge again, closing the turning hole as you go.

Now this threw up an issue for me, even though I went back over my pin basting to attach the backing fabric before quilting the three layers together I found that my backing was still baggy in places. I was going to straight line quilt along the white sashing lengths and widths of the blocks but ended up with fabric excesses, so had to tear it out and go with a 'less is more' kind of approach, hence the wonky squares, which has allowed me to fix all the layers in place without it being glaringly obvious that there is too much fabric in a couple of places!

Also, if you are using a block design that requires the correct orientation - I wouldn't want my little scooting children upside down now would I ?!? - make sure that your 'top middle' quilt top block is attached to the 'front cushion panel block' as shown below. I did it this way by shere fluke, then considered it might be wrong, read and re-read all the instructions, had a fiddle with the blocks and realised i had it right! Phew!

Lastly, I am left with 2 blocks that have no quilting. The one pictured above which is attached to the cushion front block, and also the cushion back block which was my very first picture above. Because these three blocks are sandwiched and stitched together during the construction of the quilt top, by the time the quilting process begins you cannot machine quilt them. My hand sewing is atrocious and I haven't attempted hand quilting yet, so for this quillow they will remain as they are but I am plannng on making another quillow with my Tufted Tweets that will be mine - ALL MINE! - so perhaps I'll experiment how to get around this issue then.

If any of you have made quillows in a different way please let me know, i'd be really interested to hear about it.

P.S. I'm linking up with Making Monday Marvelous for this post...