I had a crazy idea this week while walking the aisles of the craft store. It started with fabric-covered pumpkins and morphed into this fabric “painted” pumpkin pillow!
Years ago, we did a technique in quilting called “snippets” landscape quilts. This method uses fusible web-coated fabric cut into little snippets and then arranged to make beautiful landscape scenes. These quilts have a sort of painted look to them. It’s the perfect way to use up itty bitty useless scraps 🙂
I thought a pumpkin would be an easy thing to “paint” with my scrap fabrics. I gathered up a bunch of orange shades to do the job.
First, mark your background fabric with the general shape of what you want to “paint”. I made a pumpkin outline and taped it to the window to trace it onto my background fabric. You can find a printable version of my pumpkin shape here.
I tried a couple of different marking pens and finally settled on the blue air erasable. It's a faint line, but it all gets covered up anyway.
Press all your scrap strips onto a piece of fusible web, then peel the paper side off.
Cut these into chunks about 5” long and then cross cut into sliver strips that are ⅛” to ¼” wide. The narrower the sliver strips the easier they are to bend and manipulate, and that is going to come in handy!
I set up my iPad with a picture of a watercolored pumpkin so I could use it for color and shade inspiration. You could do this with any picture you are trying to mimic. It really helped keep me on the right track.
I began to “paint” with my sliver strips. I cut the ends of the strips at a sharp angle to give it that brushstroke look. I worked at the ironing board, so I could press things in place as I went, layering strips, lighter from the top and darker coming up from the bottom. The colors blended in the middle with plenty of overlap for a more organic look.
Once the body of the pumpkin was set, I did the same fusible process to a few yellowy-green scraps for the stem. I cut these all about ⅛” wide, because the stem curves pretty sharply and they needed to bend quite a bit.
Here you see the final product! My pumpkin and my inspiration pic :) not bad!
I put it on my long arm and quilted the stuffing out of it. You can see the texture I added to the pumpkin and stem. Part of that is for looks and part of it is to hold all those little strips in place for the long haul!
I cut the whole pillow top to 16” square, added a backing and a zipper, and here it is! Such a pretty, pretty fall pillow. I'm so happy with how this came out! This will grace my living room for the season.
Happy Sunday everyone,
Krista