Finished: "Have A Hoot" Vintage Owl Embroidered Cushion

Part of the 2nd Quarter FAL. My original post is here.

You may remember my little vintage embroidered owl that I designed and stitched a while back. Well I decided that the best way to finish this little guy was to sew him into a quilted cushion cover using some of my vintage sheet collection plus a couple new prints that feel kind of retro. I wanted to get this project finished in time to enter the Stumbles and Stitches Feather Your Nest Contest, so yesterday I buckled down and finished the quilting, final construction, and binding. I have to say that after making both my Hello Spring! cushion (which I also entered into the contest) and this project, I am starting to see how making pillows could become pretty addictive. ;)

  

For the front of the cushion, I used a simple sawtooth block made up of HSTs to bracket the hand stitched portion. The blue floral print comes from a vintage sheet that I thrifted. I wasn't exactly sure how well it would sew-up considering that it's a high thread-count, cotton-poly mix; but the fiber content actually ended up not being an issue at all. It sewed and pressed beautifully! Since I don't think I will be washing this too often (and if I do it will be by hand), I am not too terrible concerned with uneven shrinking due to the different fiber compositions of the fabrics I used, but I do wonder if this has ever been an issue for anyone else? Do you sew with vintage sheets and have you used/ would you use cotton-poly mixes with regular quilting cottons?

 

For the back, I made a simple envelope enclosure using the vintage sheet fabric plus a couple of stripes of my favorite herringbone print from Modern Meadow. I really lucked out that the green in the herringbone matches the green in the vintage sheet perfectly. Thanks Mr. Dewberry!

      

The yellow binding is also the same Heather Bailey print that I used for the star points on the front. It's just such a sunny, bright color that I couldn't resist using it for the binding as well!

Here's a closer shot of the embroidery (and quilting). I am currently working on a pattern for both the embroidery design and the cushion project, so hopefully I will have more to share on that soon. :)

UPDATE: Popular voting in the contest has started. If you feel so inclined, hop over here to Stumbles and Stitches to place your vote. My entries are numbers 43 & 35, but feel free to vote for your favorites. Thanks!

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