Pillow Talk {Swap} 10 Finished!

This is my 3rd time participating in and it's the 10th round of Pillow Talk Swap on flickr! It is an awesome swap because it's such a usable item. Who doesn't love a pretty new pillow? My partner this time around said she loved gray, teal, light blues, orange & yellow and that she loved chevrons. Well, I hope this will work!

 I thought about using HST, but I found a paper piecing block template on Six White Horses called Sharp Chevrons. I just love the tiny white borders on each of the chevron stripes! And that kind of precision works best with a paper pieced project.

I printed out multiple pages of the block pattern and taped together a bunch of them to create long strips. Then just spent a LOT of time paper piecing! The one problem is if you make any mistakes you have to undo the entire thing to fix it. Like I didn't realize that one of my strips was too short and I had to unpick almost a whole row to fix it! Sigh...luckily it didn't happen TOO often ;).

There is one thing I wish I could change, which I didn't really catch until the top was complete. I had tried to space out the colors but not have them be too much teal, orange, yellow, gray, teal, orange, yellow, gray, etc. I wanted some randomness but I also thought it would look good to have it be "framed" with one color. I chose orange. So the top and bottom stripes are orange. What I didn't factor in was the puffiness of the pillow. Once the form was inside you kinda lose the top and bottom stripe. That was kind of a bummer. I tried to change it, but I had already ripped off my papers and it just was not working. So I had to leave as is. I still love it, but it does bug me a little.

 For the back I thought I would try a new technique. I have done an envelope style and covered buttons, but never tried a hidden zipper. I found an great online tutorial at Amy Made That! and was on my way. 

 I found a zipper that matched perfectly and I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. It' s always fun to learn a new technique.

 Speaking of new techniques, I also decided to try machine binding on this one. As you can see in the picture above. From the front you can't even see it. On the back there is just a nice stitching line all the way around the binding. It worked better than I thought it would. It's not perfect by any means, but man does it cut down on time, whoop!

 

 For the quilting I used simple straight lines. Because there were stitching lines when I pieced the strips together, I just used those as a guide and it worked out pretty well and made the lines less noticeable.

Well partner, I hope this is what you were looking for! Can't wait to see what I get too, I will keep you posted!