NOEL

I had seen something like this floating about, or maybe I was inspired by the LOVE versions, but one of the Christmas projects I didn't get done was a NOEL pillow.  I sat down Sunday night and made my own paper piece patterns for the letters.  I knew I wanted them to be square because all my pillows are square.  One of things I didn't like so much about the LOVE pillow, was having to square it up.  Since I was working with printer paper I made them 8.5 inch squares, which along with a 3 inch border would give me a generously sized 20 inch pillow cover.

This is what I made.  I haven't put my Christmas fabric scraps away, so I might as well get on top of projects for next year.

I sat down last night to quilt it.  I wanted to do a random line quilting, but I didn't want the quilting to take away from the letters.  After staring at it for 15 minutes, it occurred to me that I could do random lines in each area, so that no line crossed from background to letter.

 I used white thread in the white background, green in the O and E and red in the N and L.

 That's some dense quilting.  This little 16 inch square took me almost 2 hours.

 When I was done, I showed it to my husband and announced, (and I quote) "As they say in the business this has the quilt snotted out of it!"  Crickets chirped as my husband stared blankly back at me.  Finally he questioned, "quilt snotted out of it?"  Doh!  We both laughed.  Reverse that, "This has the snot quilted out of it!"  He said that made much more sense.

I quilted the center before adding the borders, so that I could bury the thread ends under the border.  It's a pillow so no one will see the back.  I auditioned a bunch of different fabrics for the border, before deciding on this one.  I didn't want to use red or green for fear the letters would loose their impact.  I didn't want to use white because I have 4 small creatures (human and canine) living in the house.  I thought the cream with the dots was a nice compromise.

 However, now that I'm looking at it in daylight, I'm not loving the cream and white together and the more subdued greens and reds in the border don't look quite right with the brighter fabrics in the letters.  Suggestions?  Any of the fabrics in these pillows are available.

If you got to the end and still have a christmas project in you, I'd be happy to send you the PDF's for NOEL if you leave a comment.  Also, if you know how to enable downloads, tell me.