Zig Zag Pillows

Last Friday I told you I was in the mood for zig zags and that I'd have something to show you this week.  The end of that post had clip art that showed zig zags, a pillow, and a sheep.  I don't blame you if you didn't figure out what I was making.

This was my starting point for fabric.  After I took this photograph earlier this week, it bugged me that the sheep had whiskers.  I don't remember them having whiskers!  An internet search failed to turn up any photos of sheep with whiskers, green or otherwise.  The whiskers are now gone.

I bought a sheep panel at the Sun Prairie Quilt Show a few weeks ago.  It was so cute and went perfectly with the colors of my Urban Cabin quilt you see in the background.  A third panel is yellow, but I haven't used it yet, and don't have any plans to at this point.

 These are the zig zaggy sides.  Although I used the same fabric, I used different designs.

For the first pillow, I cross cut wedges out of straight strips, then sewed them alternately with white wedges.  This made curvy strips, like getting a perm.  I cut a straight strip down the middle.

 This is the other side of the blue sheep pillow.

I didn't have a pattern nor did I have a standard pillow form.  So I eyeballed and estimated and it came out looking different than I planned...

The white strip on the side is matched by a white strip on the left side of the blue sheep.  (See earlier photo of the sheep sides of the pillows.)   In my head, the white strips were going to be on the left and right edges, barely visible as they wrapped around and connected the zig zag piece to the sheep.  It was my squish factor.  But when I folded the pieced fabric (white strip, then zig zags, then another white strip, then sheep) in half and sewed two side seams, the whole strip was visible.  Oh well, I thought.  I decided kind of liked it - this attititude saved me the trouble of trying to fix it.

I need to learn to use zippers.  I sewed the pillow covering over the pillow, so I can't get it off unless I rip out stitches.  I did that with a previous covering that's underneath - sewed it on and didn't feel like ripping out the stitches, so there are now archaeological layers accruing.

I was going to use a blind stitch with white thread to close the opening, but I was looking through an Amy Butler book and saw a quilt that had a great big black blanket stitch on the edge.  OOH!  So I used black perl cotton and did a running stitch to close the open edge.  I loved it, so I wound up doing it on all four sides.  This helped take up the slack and make the cover fit a little tighter on the pillow form, so that was an added bonus.

This is the other side of the green sheep.  I used half-square triangles and was careful to arrange them so the colored fabric would make a nice crisp zig zag.  It's easy to get things mixed up, so I was super careful.  

I thought there was only one way to arrange them to get the zig zag, but if you look closely, you'll see that there are two.  At the top, the white fabric mirrors the zig zag, but at the bottom, the white fabric makes diamonds.  I noticed it as I was laying out the sewn strips, and since I couldn't decide which I liked better, I used both.