Riley Blake Designs Blog Tour Christmas Traditions

May 11, 2020

Riley Blake Designs Blog Tour Christmas Traditions

Hi, Everyone! Today is my turn on the Riley Blake Designs Blog Tour for Christmas Traditions by Dani Mogstad.

Christmas is my absolute favorite holiday and I try to go all out decorating. I like to add a few new things each year, if possible. This year, I'm excited to add these pillows!

When I saw this Christmas Traditions collection, I decided I wanted to make a few throw pillows with it. I love all of the pretty prints and throw pillows would allow me to leave them on the couch, front and center, to enjoy for the Christmas season.

Photo Credit: Riley Blake Designs

I started with a 10" Stacker and some fat quarters. The 10" Stacker plus white background make all of the tops of my five pillows! I'm super excited by the prospect of using a 10" Stacker for pillows again in the future because I think 10" Stackers are a good buy and I had plenty of fabric for these 5 pillow tops!! Then, you need 1 fat quarter per pillow for the backing. For the binding, you can cut enough for one pillow from one fat quarter or you can cut enough for two pillows from a half yard.

Here are each of the pillows I made-

The Dresden pillow

For this Dresden pillow, I used the 12" dresden from my Prairie quilt and then added a 3" border all around.

The Cathedral Window Pillow

This was my first time making Cathedral windows. I searched for tutorials online and ended up combining a few different ones to make it. I will to do a tutorial for this once I perfect it a little more. If you already know how to do this technique, for my white squares, I used 10" square (I'm thinking a quilt in the future using a 10" stacker!). For the colored portion, I used 2.5" squares (so you could cut from a 5" stacker if you'd like!!).

The Hexagon Pillow

For this hexagon pillow, I used the EZ Quilting Hexagon ruler and cut the hexagons to 3 1/2". Then I machine pieced the hexagons.

Tree Farm Pillow

For this Tree Farm pillow, I chose letters that I liked from Word, printed them, and cut them out. Then I traced them onto Heat n Bond Lite that was fused to the fabric (according to the package directions). I followed the same steps for the trees (except I searched for a tree image online). Then I fused the letters and trees to an 18" square of Swiss dots fabric. I straight stitched around the letters and the trees. Then I hand quilted the pillow with Cotton Perle No 12 in white.

The Patchwork Pillow

For this patchwork pillow, 36- 2 1/2" squares and pieced them into a grid of 6 by 6. Then I added a 3" white border all around.

I made the my zipper pillow backs the same way for each pillow. I have a video tutorial on my Instagram highlights if you'd like to watch. You can find it here under the highlights section.

For the batting in all of the pillows, I used:
Warm & Plush

I used my Janome Continental M7 to sew and quilt these pillows.

That's it for today! Thanks for following along!