Mother's Day pillows

I've had this idea floating around in my head for awhile, but originally it was meant to be a full scale quilt. Since I had sort of missed my mom's birthday and Mother's Day was looming, I decided to jump in and just make a couple of pillows instead. I'd still like to do a quilt this way, but I'm pretty ecstatic with how these turned out.

My original idea for a Hawaiian shirt quilt included collecting thrifted and donated old Hawaiian shirts. I do have a basket that is collecting shirts for that purpose, but I didn't have enough for these pillows. So I rolled on down to my local Jo-Ann's (which is much more local now, hurray!) Who knew they would have so many different kinds of tropical shirting fabrics? And there were even more in their on-line store, though I stuck to the ones at my store here. By the way, the 100% cotton shirting fabric was so dense, I had to use a denim needle to sew these - anything smaller just pushed the fabric into my throat plate!

I thought the best way to put all of these crazy fabrics together in one place would be a giant log cabin block, so that's what I did. I wanted the two pillows to be slightly different, so I fussy-cut the centers from 2 different fabrics and then followed the same order of the logs. I ran out of fabric at the end, it was just short of the size I needed, so I pulled some Kona black from the stash to sort of frame it all in. I actually love how the black fabric kind of grounds all of the craziness going on.

The palm tree fabric really reminded me of my parents' beach house (where these are meant to live), so I bought enough extra of that fabric to make a nice envelope back. I also thought it would still work if they ended up turned around on her green couch. The pillow forms were leftovers from Christmas sewing. They are down and I got them from fabric.com for a great price. I love how squishy they are, but they still have a little firmness to them since I made the covers a 1/2" smaller than the form (my favorite pillow making trick!).

Unfortunately, I was so excited to give them to my mom, who happened to be visiting over Mother's Day, that I forgot to take any pictures before they left. So Mom graciously snapped some shots pool side. Thanks, Mom!