Making a Back Porch Pillow with WonderFil Threads

Selecting the fabrics

Usually when I make a quilt, the last thing I select is the thread, and I pick it to match or contrast the fabrics in the finished quilt top. Today, since I have a limited numbers of colors of WonderFil threads to choose from, I’m working backwards.

I really love the blues and greens in my selection of threads, so I picked those and started to select fabrics to match. I wanted the quilting to stand out, so I picked a white-on-white for the background and a selection of dark blues, medium blues and teals for my design.

The hexagons have it!

If you haven’t noticed yet – hexagons are EVERYWHERE! From traditional grandmothers garden quilts to more modern designs, hexagons are extremely versatile and are popular with quilters who want to hand piece, machine piece or applique. I’ve just recently delved into the world of hexagons and I have to say, I really love the modern look that you can accomplish using bright fabrics and neutrals like white, grey and black. Here is a quilt that I’ve been working on for a little while.

Back Porch Pillow supplies list

If you’d like to make your own hexagon appliqued pillow, here are the supplies that you’ll need.

White fabric for pillow front                  19″ x 19″

Lining fabric                                          21″ x 21″

Batting                                                  21″ x 21″

Fabric for pillow back                          two pieces 15″ x 19″ each

Twelve scraps of fabric                       5″ x 5″ each

Fusible web                                          ¼m

505™ Spray

16″ pillow form

Starting my back porch pillow

For my quilted pillow, I decided to do a hexagon design that is appliqued using fusible web. I want to quilt the background first, before I applique the hexagons, so the first thing I needed to do was to make the quilt sandwich. The pillow top fabric, batting and lining were layered and fused together with 505™ Spray. For detailed directions on layering a quilt sandwich, check out my post from last month at this link.

Marking the quilting lines

Once the quilt sandwich was made, I needed to mark a line on the top, to machine quilt using my walking foot. I wanted to do a 2″ grid across the entire top, so the first thing I did was to mark a line on an angle across the top. I used my long rotary cutting ruler and a mechanical pencil to lightly mark the quilt top.

Machine quilting with my WonderFil threads

Once the line was drawn, I used my walking foot to stitch along the line using my FruittiFT22. I then used this line as a guide to draw parallel lines 2″ apart all across the top. I stitched along all of these lines with the same color of Fruitti thread. Once all of these were stitched, I drew one line the other direction, perpendicular to the first lines. I stitched this line with FruittiFT23 and then drew parallel lines to it, 2″ apart all across the top. I stitched the rest of the lines with the same color thread.

The next steps…

Now that the quilting is all done, I’ll need to prepare my hexagon applique shapes, but I think I’ll leave that for tomorrow. The machine quilting that I did with the WonderFil threads looks awesome and I can’t wait to use the Spagetti threads to machine applique my hexagons!