For the second year in a row, I organized a Post-Sewing-Summit Swap among a handful of people who attended the conference. Guidelines were pretty loose, you can make a wide variety of small projects for your secret partner. The idea is to use some of the inspiration we all felt in Salt Lake City and turn it into something fun.

At the opening reception this year, I won a bag full of incredible books. Among them was Aneela Hoey’s Little Stitches.  Oh, this book is so stinking adorable, and it makes me suddenly want to embroider EVERYTHING.  So, for this swap, I decided to play around.

I settled on this girl with the umbrella and embroidered it on Essex Linen. I debated whether to turn it into a mini quilt or a pillow, but ultimately thought a pillow would be fun and a little different. I added the patchwork gray ring around the embroidery, a thin band of white, and then a big swath of blue.

I loved that the whole thing reminded me (pleasantly) of a rainy day, and thought some concentric circle quilting would give the effect of raindrops. I am quite happy with the way it turned out, though if I had to do it over again, I think I might use my free-motion foot instead of my walking foot. Though it’s not large (only about 14″ square), it was still a bit of a pain to turn the whole quilt 360° for every single circle, and think I probably could have done it with nearly the same accuracy with my free-motion foot. Ah well, maybe next time.

For the back, I decided to put in a zipper for the first time, instead of an envelope closure. I saw this tutorial kicking around on Pinterest, and used the idea for this pillow.  I also decided to put a binding on the pillow, because who doesn’t love a striped binding?

Anyways, this pillow and a few little extras are hitting the mail on Monday morning. I was totally excited when I found out who my partner was, so I really hope she likes this. Fingers crossed the post office can get it there before Thanksgiving!