Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Half-Square Triangle Star Pillow

Here's a pillow cover that I made for my sister for Christmas.


The project was inspired by these pillow covers, which I picked up from my local IKEA per my sister's request (her IKEA is not very local at all and my girl LOVES Smaland, so I was glad to do the errand) and sent off to her in the fall.
 

I thought it would be fun to make a patchwork pillow to match (sneaky sneaky!), so before I packaged them up I pulled out some fabrics that matched the various stripes.
 

Then I played around on some graph paper with star designs made from half-square triangles, and wound up with this.


My sister loves the color orange, and I know she has a lot of blue in her house (if I'm remembering correctly, the IKEA pillows were destined for a room with a blue accent wall), so I wanted those two colors to feature prominently in the design.

And she's a vet student, so getting a couple of cats in there was a must.
 

The star design I ended up with was looking pretty traditional to me, so I added a few bits of randomly placed citron green to modern things up a bit.
 

I gave it a simple envelope back.  



My sister says she loves the result, though of course my eye focuses on the mistakes and imperfections.

Did you notice how the center of the star is all squared up and perfectly matched points, while the surrounding blocks are wonky and wavy and in some places way off? I used two different methods to make the half-square triangles for this project, and one method was far superior to the other.

I'll give you the details of the half-square triangle cage match in my next post.

6 comments:

  1. Nope I didn't notice the points not matching... until you said something. Looking forward to the hst cage match post.

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  2. Ha! We're always our own worst critics, aren't we?

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  3. Sarah, it looks great. I love how the red pops! And same here, I didn't notice any mismatched points until you mentioned it. I think you did a fantastic job.

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  4. I love the pillow--and didn't notice the matching issue at all until I went back to see what you were talking about. The way you've combined the fabric patterns works so well. I would never think to put them together as you have (because I know so little about how to do this). Jealous of your skill and talent.

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  5. Thanks for stopping by, Rita and Jenny! You're reminding me of a rule we used to have in an old writing group of mine: no caveats allowed. Perhaps the same should apply to patchwork! Still, I think it's interesting to analyze and figure out how to get better.

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  6. The project was inspired by these pillow covers, which I picked up from my local IKEA per my sister's request (her IKEA is not very local at all ... trianglepillow.blogspot.com

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