Irish Christmas Cushion Swap

Christmas is quickly approaching!  That's right - it's time we start talking about it, pulling our heads out of the sand/snow drift.  To kick off the season here at FSQ head quarters, I have signed up for the Modern Irish Christmas cushion swap.  As per all of our swaps, an inspirational mosaic was created....  

I don't know why Big Huge Labs has stopped giving me HTML to link to all of these photos, giving credit to the creators.  Has anyone cracked that code, yet?  

Irish folks, signups close on Friday so get your name in the hat today if you want to play along!

Oops! Forgot this one!

I completely forgot to tell you about this bit of happiness.  A finish!  I have not had a finish in ages.

I had a orphan block from my Twinkle Twinkle bee quilt that joined me in Jen Kingwell's hand quilting class at the Fat Quarterly retreat.  I recently spent evenings echo quilting the star, straight line quilting the red boarder and then quilting triangles into the outer pink boarder.

I then was stuck.  The star needed more, but it took me ages to find inspiration.  Or for inspiration to find me.  Eventually I remembered that I had stencils for orange peels so I thought I would give them a try between the star points.  And they worked!

The back is an envelope closure of teal blue, coordinating with the front.  This is my first cushion cover, so I could not envision how it would come together.  Now that I have one down, I think I could try a zip in my next version. 

And so it lives on the living room couch.  It has been napped on, curled up on and snuggled by the dog.  It adds a super spot of color and makes me happy every time I see it.  Needless to say, I'm already plotting my next!