When I was at the Quilt Festival, I happened to see a booth with a monthly pillow kit and best of all the teeny tiny pieces were precut so all I had to do was trim the backing fabric, put the pieces into place and move around as needed, sew and that was about it.

I learned my lesson from the December pillow and started this one at the ironing board once I got the brown background fabric trimmed to the size in the directions.

I started in the middle, between the “n” and “t” and centered both of those left to right and top to bottom so that I had a starting point.  Then I laid a ruler across the bottom to get the bottom of the letters even or at least in the general area since this isn’t a precise pattern like some quilting patterns.

There are more pieces than it probably looks like at first glance because all the snow on top of each letter is a separate piece as well as 3 pieces for the cup of hot chocolate and the snowman also had several tiny pieces.  It didn’t take too long though and then I ironed it in sections.

After that, I spent probably most of the time in any one area satin stitching around each letter and accompanying decoration.  I thought honestly that was going to take me hours but it wasn’t bad at all. I had a vacation day so I had plenty of time to spend on it thankfully.

I didn’t quilt the pillow top for December and later wished I had.  I was just in a hurry to see how it looked.  I’m trying to work on several types of quilting and on this one I used one ruler specifically – it’s I think an XL sized curved ruler that’s typically used for curved cross hatching.  I bought it from Quilter’s Apothecary and I’m always surprised how much I use it, given that it’s a large ruler.  He also sells them in smaller sizes.

I had a nice big piece of batting left from the last quilt so I used that.  It’s not high loft; I might try that next time for a different effect.  This particular fabric is a perfect match for the colors that I have in our foyer where I have a bench.

I spent an afternoon on it which is perfect.  There’s another company that makes these type of pillows with more intricate patterns and I love, love, love theirs also but this line is definitely quicker.  Less detail, less time.  I have a friend whose made several of the other line and they are so cute! This is a great way to make a small change each month which doesn’t take a lot of time.  Now I’m anxious to see what the February pillow will look like!

I’m betting these kits are cut with either a Brother ScanNCut, Janome Artistic Edge cutter or similar machine.  It seems like someone who was artistic and had one of these could open up an Etsy shop selling kits in small quantities and build up a business pretty quickly.  I don’t have one of those types of cutters but they look like a great thing to have if you enjoy applique.