Pillow Talk

One of the reasons I love making pillows is that it allows me to work on an idea on a small scale. I can try out something without committing to a quilt. Then, if I like the image, I can expand on it in making a larger piece.
The two top pieces were made with the idea of making strips of itajime or clamp-resisted fabric and then not cutting them up as much as I have in the past. I wanted there to be sections rather than just squares. I was a little bolder in using whole strips in the second pillow than in the first. I also wanted to maintain the sense of grid that the squares made and I wanted the quilting to echo that. I decided to use a quilting thread color that would really sit on top of the image and emphasize the grid.
The second two pieces were actually made after I had already made a couple of study quilts in much the same way. I used my batiked and dyed striped fabric. In the first pillow, I tried to have the stripes"flow" from one square to the next. Here too, I was trying to get a sense of the piece reading as an overall grid. I wanted the lines to connect across the entire image without concern for whether those lines were in the same block. In the fourth image, I liked the idea of stripes creating stripes. I also liked the notion of making the striped blocks look woven.
I definitely have plans to expand all these ideas on a larger scale.