Pin cushion

While I was on vacation a couple of weeks ago, after going to a quilt store with my quilting bee girls, I took some time to play and make a pin cushion.

This was my attempt.  I looked up a free pattern on the Internet.  This is a Dresden plate block that is sewn into a box shape with a bottom box in a different colour.  It's pretty large finishing at 6" square and 2" high.  It was fairly easy to make, until I did the centre circle.  The first circle I cut was too small, because I didn't include the seam allowance.  The second circle I thought was fine, but I misjudged the placement.  When I sewed around the circle I ended up too short to catch all the Dresden plates.

So....I took that circle off and tried again.  I had it sewn again and it looked good, until I started filling the cushion up with the ground walnut shells.  The movement and stretching caused the Dresden plates to work themselves out from underneath the centre circle.  This was frustrating, so I put it aside for a bit.

Part of my frustration was that I didn't like the colours I chose.  They were not my first choice.  I wanted something softer looking, but settled for these colours, the problem with the centre piece didn't help and lastly the pin cushion was much bigger than I thought, so I didn't have enough ground walnut shells to file the cushion.  I took this as a sign.  A sign that I should give this up.

I don't give up easy.  Instead I decided to take it as a sign that I should do this properly with the softer colours like I wanted to.  When I went to The Hobby Horse this past weekend I picked out a few coordinating fabrics for the fabric that I wanted to use in the first place, as well as some more walnut shells.

Here is what I ended up with.

I like the pastel colours for this better.  The dark green circle is the same fabric I used for the bottom and bottom half of the pin cushion.  What do you think?