The Market East Pillow Collection

I've been selling them at my pop-up shop and at clover market, and posting about them on instragram and facebook, but haven't dedicated a post to them yet.

So here they are, the Market East Pillows!!




I designed the fabric and it printed through Spoonflower. Spoonflower is the greatest invention. You upload your design and pick the repeat type and voila, they print it for you. It's the coolest thing ever.

I used a photo that I took of the Market East train station in Philadelphia. Currently the station name is actually Jefferson station, but I seriously hate when buildings are renamed, so I will forever call it Market East. Anyway, the station has a two huge walls of tiles that from far away you can tell are trees, but from most vantage points they just look like random angled subway tiles. I took a photo and did a mirror repeat to make a this cool design.

This pillow was made with a full piece of the fabric on the front. The rest are a patchwork style. 

The quilting lines follow the lines of the tile at some points, then veer off at others.

Here is a little summary of the process. Not included is me struggling and struggling to sew invisible zippers! Sometimes they are really easy, and other times they are very, very hard.

First I chose some fabrics from my stash that coordinated with the fabric. A personal favorite is the shot cotton. It is a woven blend of two very similar shades of the same color, which gives it depth.

 The first cut. 

In the middle of this I had to move the sewing area to our living room while we were re-doing the flooring. The flooring needs it's own blog post, which I will do as soon as I get some decent photos of the room. Anyway, having the whole dining room to myself was great! It has giant windows on each end, which was lovely.

I started out making a big square. As you can see, this was in the spring :-) My method is to just work by adding rectangular pieces of fabric. It's an organic process and I don't use any patterns or have a real plan besides try to balance out the colors. Little bit of this, little bit of that and then it's complete. 

Then I cut the large shape into separate squares and added fabric as needed to make each the correct size for the pillow form. This gave each of them a different and distinct look, as compared to the modified log pattern that I started with. 

Then each was made into a pillow. I still have two left in the shop, so grab them while they last! I have a smidge more fabric left so there may be a few more in the future. But each one will be unique.