Mini Pillows from Extra Blocks

While working on a community quilt with some of my quilty friends, I had two sets of a four block quad leftover from the quilt pattern Open Options by Material Girlfriends. I could have made one two-sided pillow but it would have been rather large. Instead, I had two pillow forms that were each approximately half the square size of a four block quad. By placing a form on the diagonal and folding the quad block corners in to the center I could make two mini-pillows. I would remove half of one block and insert a zipper in that seam, carefully, since it was a bias seam and could stretch. Then there would be an access side to insert the pillow form.

I spent WAY too much time on this supposedly quick project intended to use up extra blocks, spare pillow forms, and short zippers -- all items already in my stash. I will not blog about it in detail, especially since I took minimal photos of my goofs to illustrate this trivial pillow task. In summary these are the mistakes I made:

1. I thought I needed to add a strip to give more seam allowance and supply more fabric for overlap at the zipper. I did not. I wound up ripping it off.
2. I underestimated the seam allowance size needed to make the pillow cover fit the form snugly. I re-seamed three times going from ¼" to ½" to ¾" before saying this is good enough. It could have been tighter still, but I wanted to declare this "quick" project done!
3. I took the first zipper, the one in the aqua pillow, out twice and inserted it a third time due to the seam allowance change. You can guess how this warped that bias edge and how difficult it was to pick out stitches from the zipper tape. I had learned by the second grey pillow; I only inserted the 9" zipper once using the largest seam allowance.
4. I should not have used zippers at all and just stitched the opening closed. These pillows are small enough at under 11" to be just tossed in the wash as is, without removing the covers.

When completed though, I liked the diagonal block wrap idea and was pleased at the way the edges of the pillows look with contrasting triangles peeking out.

Those triangles peek out differently for the front and the back of each pillow.

I also liked the four patch block effect on the pillow corners.

I still think this is a cute idea for leftover blocks. Remember the old adage, "Measure twice, cut once"? I need a new adage. "Measure once to avoid sewing three times!"