Scrap Fabric Project #1

I had lunch with my lovely friend Kirsty from Bon­jour Quilts recently and while we were in the area we could­n’t res­ist a trip to Ikea. Like a moth to a flame we wandered mes­mer­ised into the hal­lowed halls of bed­rooms, kit­chens, bath­rooms and liv­ing areas. Like all good Ikea shops I just needed one thing.… ser­vi­ettes. I fig­ure you’ve already guessed that’s not all I left with!

Quite apart from the oth­er gazil­lion things I all of a sud­den ‘needed’ I picked up this den­im Ormkak­tus pil­low cov­er. They ser­i­ously cost just $5.00! As soon as I saw it I knew it would be bril­liant for a quick and easy scrappy throw pillow. 

Back at home it took me about 5 minutes to dump the Ikea pur­chases on the kit­chen bench, shove some food towards the high school­er and run into my quilt­ing cave where I pulled out all my cor­al, pinky, peach scraps. 

I did­n’t ori­gin­ally have a design planned out but then I remembered a Dresden throw pil­low I had made from one of the pat­terns in the book Vin­tage Vibe by Amber from Gigi’s Thimble. It’s such a great book and I’m still work­ing my way through every single pat­tern in it. You can see some of the pro­jects I’ve already made by click­ing here and here.

PS: Amber has recently star­ted releas­ing the indi­vidu­al pat­terns from her book so keep an eye on her blog and Ins­tagram accounts if you’re look­ing for one (or more) of them.

Dresden plate quilt blocks are such a cute design. They are per­fect for using up scraps. Actu­ally, they look good in just about any fab­ric com­bin­a­tion you can think of… two colours/prints, super scrappy, single col­our, etc. I cut 5.5″ blades for this pil­low which made a 12.25″ fin­ished Dresden plate. I think the size works well on the pil­low but it could eas­ily be made a little bigger. 

At just $5.00 the Ormkak­tus pil­low is so inex­pens­ive I don’t think it’s even worth con­sid­er­ing mak­ing that part your­self. It’s a little fiddly to appli­qué the Dresden plate on to the pil­low by hand but it is totally doable and really does­n’t take very long. Trust me! 

So there you go. Scrap pro­ject #1 done and dus­ted and it was a bar­gain twice over with the Ormkak­tus pil­low. Thanks Ikea! If you’d like to make your own Dresden pil­low you can find great Dresden tutori­als at Cor­al & Co. or at Mis­souri Star’s You­Tube Chan­nel.