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In early December, Nova posted her pattern for Pillow Pockets.

The pattern was so incredibly cute, I just knew I wanted to make one for my niece, but I wasn’t sure I could pull it together in time for her birthday. I kept seeing the pattern pop up all over the internet and read about how fun and simple this pattern is to complete, so I thought I would give it a try.

After an evening pulling out all of my fabrics and choosing colors for the Dresden Plate, I spent some time trying out different backgrounds for the pillow. I really like the high contrast between the background fabric and the Dresden Plate in Nova’s samples.

I also liked the idea of something more harmonious.

In the end, I decided on the strawberries because pink is the girl’s favorite color and I’m not sure what other project lends itself so well to hot pink strawberries.

The Dresden plate was straightforward to piece together, but I had never made a pillowcase before, so I anticipated pulling out a lot of stitches stitches and trying to figure it all out. Indy settled in for a long evening, but the pattern was actually a snap.

I found every step of the way so rewarding. Each night I worked on this, I went to sleep pretty pleased. I have had a couple dud patterns recently, so I am grateful for the clear instructions I know I saved myself a lot of headache.

Finished with hours to spare before her party!

I kept the quilting super simple.

I used a complimentary stripe for the fabric in the back. I just added this to my stash after visiting (read: paying extremely high prices for little bits of gorgeous fabrics) Britex in San Francisco.

Okay, EXTREMELY simple quilting. Don’t mind the cat hair.

I received a stack of Robert Kaufman Poseidon solids for Christmas and the one I tried out as a background fabric ended up making a perfect for the binding.

I repeated the stripe inside the pocket.

I am really happy with the final product.

The birthday girl was pretty happy too!

Two years ago I walked by Metamorphosis in Cambridge, MA and found this old Singer 15-19 complete with a cabinet to fold the machine away into.

Anthony and I were making plans to move to New York City and I spun a long tale about how I could keep all my sewing confined to this one desk by keeping my machine inside it, my books on top of it, and my fabric underneath it. The student housing I was considering was 450 sq feet (including the bathroom), so the idea of a small machine that could fold away was appealing.

Anthony was not completely convinced of its utility, but I called my mom and she told me it was the perfect gift for my birthday.

After moving to New York, it seemed Anthony was right. I continued to use my Kenmore and my Singer was been stashed away in its cabinet taking up space. I didn’t even know how to thread the machine.

Finally, last week, I asked him to sit and help me figure it all out. We looked up the serial number and found out the machine was built in New Jersey in 1954. Through the magic of YouTube and an instruction manual, we were able to get the old girl up and running.

The first creation- Towel Hat. For me this is like I just got a brand new machine and it is the perfect counterpart to my Kenmore. It doesn’t have as many stitches and bells and whistles as my Kenmore, but it can sew through many, many layers and it has twice as much space under the arm so I can quilt larger quilts by machine.