Christmas pillows

Pillows seem always to be a small, nice thing I can hand-make for people at Christmas time. They're both time and cost-effective and they're cute, too. This'll be the second year I've given away a small mountain of pillows to family at Christmas. And I think it'll have to be one of the last times. Nobody needs 50 different holiday pillows. (Or Do They? Hmm...)

This first one, in blues, is actually a kit I picked up at one of my least favourite fabric stores in Calgary. I always seemed to have bad experiences when I shopped there - mainly being ignored and/or eyed up as if I was going to smear dirty fingers all over everything, usually both simultaneously - but it's the only quilt store that's very accessible to me by transit. And this most recent visit when I picked up the kit was a welcome change - I was greeted, had an offer of help, and after refusing help was left alone until I was ready to go.

Another problem I often have with this particular quilt store is that I find their fabric selection is often a little bit... stodgy. I mean, it's just quite obvious that whoever does the buying has a very different eye than I do. On the other hand, the next nearest store is another 30-40 minutes away by transit. So I deal.

In any case, the blue pillow is going to be for my grandma, as I thought she might like a more muted palette than I'd typically prefer. And if she wishes, she can leave the pillow on the couch year round, since there's nothing too excessively Christmas about it, more just wintery.

I picked out the fabric myself for these two pillows, so they're a bit more my style. I like the green/red combination like this, where the colours aren't quite the typical green and red of Christmas decorations. And again, the prints aren't quite Christmas, while still being Christmasy. I haven't quite decided who is getting these pillows. My Christmas is very much up in the air - we don't really know exactly who is and isn't coming from the family, so depending who makes the trip out, that'll be who they go home with, I guess.