Quilted Pillow Case

I had a lot of scraps leftover from my herringbone t-shirt quilt and thought it would be fun to use them for a cozy quilt-as-you-go pillow case to go with my warm quilt.

scraps - You could use any kind of scraps, and they can be any size, but you need them to be in strips. Varying widths and lengths are perfect for this project.

rotary cutter with mat and ruler

sewing machine

quilt batting

backing fabric - I used muslin. It isn't going to show, so any piece of fabric will do, but it needs to be the size of the pillow case.

cotton fabric - This fabric will make up the back of your pillow case.

Cut a piece of batting and backing fabric the size and shape you want your pillow to be.

Pin the batting to the fabric at the corners only.

Put your first piece onto the batting in a central (or semi-central) location. You'll be working your way out from this spot. The further from the center you go, the longer your outside strips will need to be. If you mainly have short strips, I would stick as close to center as possible.

Stitch it down with repeating rows. If you rotate the piece, you can do all the stitches at once. For example, stitch left, down, right, down, left, down, etc.

Each additional piece you add will be stitched once on the reverse side before adding the striped stitching.

Continue to add pieces while covering the raw edges of all the pieces applied before them.

When you add pieces that overlap the edges, cut off the excess before doing your striped stitches.

When doing the striped stitches, instead of going off the edge, run the stitches along the edge.

As you go along, you'll need longer strips to cover the raw edges of the previous pieces. You can see here how the strips are much longer than the ones I started with.

When you've covered the entire pillow, the edges will be messy.

Trim the edges with a rotary cutter.

Run a stitch around the edge of the entire pillow.

Cut a piece of fabric for the back of the pillow that is around 6"-8" longer than your pillow's front.

Cut the piece in half.

Press and hem one edge of each piece that will cross the center of the pillow case. The outside edge of the backing pieces can be left raw.

Pin the backing to the front of the pillow case as shown in the first two images.

Stitch around the edges.

Stitch diagonally across and trim off the corners.

Turn right side out.

Put your case onto a pillow.