Halloween Crazy Quilt Pillow

I love crazy quilting - probably because there are no rules & whatever you want, goes! While at Baby Lock Tech last week, I saw a CQ Pillow done with a Halloween theme & decided I was going to make one. I forced myself to put the borders on the Peppermint Quilt by bribing myself that as soon as I finished that & designed the baby quilt from the "mistake" blocks, I could start the CQ pillow.

I finished the Peppermint Quilts (sorry it's at the store and the camera is here - photos coming soon) & designed the baby quilt early Sunday morning. Judy has the kit & is testing the pattern. Photos of that soon too. I pressed that quilt off, folded it up & dived into crazy quilting.

Half the fun of crazy quilting is collecting the "stuff" that you are going to embellish with. I love the "garish" colors of Halloween - the oranges, the bright purples & the lime greens, set off with black. I have to control myself when buying Halloween fabrics - one year we ended up with 60 bolts! Yesterday morning, I gathered the fabrics I'd brought home from the shop the night before and I pieced the CQ block.

Since I still had time before we opened the shop, I did three machine embroidered appliques too! They're from the Halloween Fun multi format CD we have on the web page.

The block looks ok, but it will look better when all the embellishments are on! Dang it, it was time to go to the shop & I had to stop playing & be responsible!

This morning the fun started - I pulled out my embellishing tub and discovered it was a tangled mess from some classes I'd taught. I ignored the mess, pulled a few things I wanted & put the tub on the floor - out of sight! (Ok, I admit, I later dumped the tub out onto the floor, sorted through all the yarns, threads & ribbons, sorted them by color into plastic bags & then even color coordinated my beads! WAHOO!)

I started out with Bobbinwork where you wind a thicker thread into your bobbin & sew on the wrong side on the fabric. Very cool! Bobbinwork gives you a "soft" version of the stitch. This is a rounded zig zag with a 5 weight thread.

I love to couch, this is where you take a ribbon or ric rac or a thicker thread, lay it along the seam & stitch it down with a decorative thread. I had the shiny ribbon like thread for awhile, just waiting for the perfect project!

When I went to quilt shows many years ago, there used to be a couple who had a booth full of charms. Of course they were too tempting to pass up and I have little bags filled with all kinds of them - patiently waiting. The quarter moon fits perfectly on the tip of the hat.

Candy corn is my absolute favorite! We have these buttons at the shop & they just had to go on my pillow. The purple bobbinwork is a multistep ziz zag stitch & the shiny ribbon is couched down with a feather stitch & metallic thread.

I used jumbo ric rac around the edge of my pillow to give it some flair.

TA DAH! It's done and I love it!