Come to the Dark Side

Happy Valentine's Day everyone!  My husband and I rarely give each other gifts, but this year, I went all out making him something special.  Back when I was making a silly amount of pillows last month, my husband said to me, "When are you going to make me a black, gray, and red pillow?  Or a Star Wars pillow?"  Some day, dear.  Then the very next morning, I received an email that had this amazing graphic of all the Star Wars characters pixelated!  It was perfect!  I had to do some internet searching to find out where it came from originally and found Andy Rash's iotacons blog.  He'd written a recent post giving permission to make crafty items from his designs, so I figured I'd just go for it!  So, I went through my stash and found three fat quarters of light gray, dark gray and black, plus a little blue and red, and some white background fabric and went at it.

For Valentine's Day, my husband gets a quilted Darth Vader pillow.

This was such a fun pillow to make!  It ended up 24" square, the Vader character is made up of 1" finished squares.  I cut up the rest of the fat quarters to use as a border and for the back of the pillow.

I had a version of it finished last week, but decided the back should be quilted, too, and that an envelope closure was not good enough.  So I took it apart and quilted the back and added a zipper under one of the white flaps.  I had also planned on finishing the edges with binding for the second go-around, but by the time I got back to making the other changes, a week had passed and I completely forgot!  I didn't want to take the stitches out a second time, so I left it.

Here's what the front and back looked like before the quilting:

I quilted the front with 1/2" quilting lines for the white background and stitched in the ditch around Darth and around the border.

Darth now sits prominently in a chair in our living room.  It's awesome.  And oh so geeky.

Thank you so much to Andy Rash for creating this fabulous design!  Check out his blog - his stuff is incredible.

Entering this in the Blogger's Pillow Party for February!  And linking up to Fabric Tuesday!