Flowering Snowball

Well, I was so excited to see how this pillow would turn out that I just kept working on it.  And let me tell you...I could not be more in love with it.  It's not mine...it will go to someone in the swap, but I'm soaking in the beauty of this piece for now.

I just keep staring at it.  I think I could stare at it for hours (which is a good thing! because I need to quilt it and still turn it into a pillow!).  I've used bits of Flea Market Fancy here and there throughout my sewing career but mainly because someone was sweet enough to give me a scrap.  And then gloriously, they re-released a number of the prints from the collection and I was able to get some for myself.  So this is the first project that I've ever been able to do with unlimited access to this collection and create what I needed.

When a collection  has been out as long as Flea Market Fancy has and been sooooo loved, I feel a certain pressure to create a piece that uses the fabric in a new way.  Or makes you fall in love with the fabric all over again.  This pillow certainly does that for ME, so mission accomplished.

I put together this little mosaic as a sort of visual guide for how I sewed the pieces together and to show the complexity of the pattern.  Like any pattern, it's all about breaking it down into steps that make sense and are not overwhelming.  I chose the fabric, cut the fabric out using the templates, laid out the pattern on my design wall (crucial for this particular pattern).  Then I sewed and sewed and sewed some more.  Each block was broken down into one curve at a time.

One thing I did this time that I've never done before is sew my curves together without pins (with the exception of one pin where I had to get seams to match).  I think the whole pattern seemed so impossible to me from the beginning that I was willing to try another thing that seemed impossible...curves without pins.  And it worked beautifully.  I don't know why it clicked this time, but it did.  And I won't fight it. ;)

Next Step:  Quilting.

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