Valentine's Day Project

I believe I've mentioned that I started a quilt group in my MOMS Club.  There were really only two of us attending and that seemed sort of boring, so we brainstormed about ways of bring others over to the dark side with us.  We finally decided that we'd have to teach them to quilt, but with little projects that could be easily finished without much homework.  It's working, we now have 5 of us quilting and 3 more people who come to hang out and watch and are getting inspired.  Plus, it great having a few people not sewing so they can corral the kids of those of us who sewing.  Our first project was quilt as you go pillows.  Next we made appliqued Christmas tree skirts and now we are doing a paper pieced Valentine's day project.  We found free paper pieced letters spelling LOVE and a heart.  My co-founder is making an ambitious sounding wall hanging and I decided to stick with a pillow.  I'm not sure what everyone else is doing with theirs, but it sure will be fun to see.  It amuses me greatly that we've gotten others hooked on quilting, without them yet doing any traditional piecing.  We're remedying that.  We're starting a block of the month project with the blocks being put together for a Project Linus quilt.

Anyway, on to the Valentine's Day project.  I decided to substitute the heart for the letter O.  The heart wasn't the same size as the letters so I improvised a bit.  It worked out in the end, but I wish I'd learn to think these things through ahead of time instead just jumping in.

Of course I'm using scraps, which doesn't make anything easier on me.  There are a few places where I had to improv because the pieces I used weren't quite big enough and I was too lazy to rip the seam and fix it.

The letters are the size of a piece of paper, so in order to turn this into a square pillow cover I needed to add width to the blocks.  I could have done this better.  If I had used a different brown in the middle that seam that isn't lined up would look more deliberate and less accidental.  Looking at the picture, I wish I had stayed with the pink tonal prints and not used that one print with the brown squares.  This is probably why I like to do every project at least twice.  I learn something from the first go around and I change in the second version.  I probably won't make another LOVE pillow, but I think I'll make a NOEL pillow before I put all my Christmas scraps away.  The O in noel would look cute as an ornament, wouldn't it?

I'm going to FMQ this pillow.  It will be my first real attempt.  I'm going to use the heart shaped leaf pattern I was practicing the other day.  Only, I'll leave them as hearts, not make them leaves.  Practicing my FMQ skills on pillows is probably perfect.  They aren't too big, I can use a different pattern on each and if I screw it up, I can toss it.