Yay, long weekend! For the past two days, Patrick hung out with Arlo while I worked on another sewing project--floor pillows for Arlo's play area.

When Arlo and I were over at Susan's house a few weeks ago, he seemed to really enjoy hanging out on the floor pillows in Pearl's playroom, so I decided to get a couple for our house. Before Arlo was born, I had bought a bunch of Anna Maria Horner's beautiful Little Folks voile and Good Folks flannel for a couple of projects that I never got around to making, including the baby zig zag quilt. I liked the fabric so much that I kind of wanted to hoard it and never use it, but I decided it would be better to use it to cover the floor pillows, so I could see it every day!

I based the pillow cover pattern on the Baby Folk Dance quilt, with a few changes. I made a couple mistakes, but I also learned a lot, and I'm happy with the results. Patches is too--she settled right onto the pillows as soon as I put the covers on them. Arlo is less sure; I think he feels like he can't roll properly when he's on them. But even if he doesn't want to lie on them, they come in handy for cushioning his fall when he's working on sitting up.

I've included a few pictures and notes below to give you an idea of how I made the covers. I'm considering making a few more covers, and if I do, I'll take more pictures of the process and write a more detailed description of what I did.

• Instead of using the templates provided with the Baby Folk Dance quilt pattern, I cut out a bunch of 8.25-inch squares, which I cut in half diagonally to make triangles (this is the approach used for the Big Zig quilt in Denyse Schmidt's Quilts). If I were going to do this again, I'd use slightly larger squares (8.5 or 8.75 inches on a side), since my pillow tops ended up a few inches smaller than I'd intended.

  

  To make the small end pieces for each row, I cut one of the triangles in half again.

  
  
  

  For each two-color zig zag row, I used two half triangles of each color and one quarter triangle of each color. My original plan was to use five rows per pillow top, but since the tops ended up smaller than anticipated, I ended up adding a sixth row.

• You may have noticed that the zig zags are missing their points on my first pillow cover (on the left in the pictures above). This is because I didn't pay enough attention to the diagrams in the quilt pattern and matched up the sides of my triangles instead of offsetting them by my seam allowance (1/4 inch). I corrected this when I made the second pillow top. Here are some pictures showing how I offset the pieces for the second pillow top.

  Here they are before sewing (the first picture is the pieces next to each other, the second picture is the pieces with right sides together):

  
  
  

  Here's what they look like after sewing:

  

• I backed the pillow tops with 27-inch squares of flannel and added a zipper on the side, as described in the helpful tutorial on design*sponge. This was my first time making a zippered pillow cover, and I was surprised by how easy it was. Now I want to make new zippered covers for all of our couch pillows!

  

• The pillow inserts are 26x26 inches and are from IKEA (Gosa Tulpan). Patrick had a hard time finding them--it turns out that to save space, they're sold rolled up in a plastic bag. They unfurled nicely once they were out of the bag, and since they're stuffed with goose feathers, they're nice and squishy.