Swedish Wedding Cushions

A friend of mine got married last week and the lovely man she had chosen is Swedish.  The wedding incorporated a lot of Swedish things, including a bi-lingual celebrant and Dalecarlian horses in black and white as the cake topper.


For a wedding gift, I wanted to give them something that held some Swedish tradition to it.  My limited research on the internet told me that Swedish weddings used to include cushions which were carried across town as part of the bridal procession and then used during the ceremony for the bride and groom to sit on.  After the wedding, the cushions were displayed in the front window of the bridal home to let everyone know they were newly weds. (Sadly I can no longer find the link where I got this information from).

I chose the log cabin design as this has been noted as a popular quilt block in Sweden and I chose purple because this was one of the wedding colours.

I constructed the blocks using the quilt-as-you-go method, but many of my blocks ended up  not being square in the end due to fabric creepage.  I was using a walking foot but I guess more patience and practice is required.  This method involved starting with a square of wadding and then sewing each piece onto the wadding and folding it back over the seam, therefore piecing and quilting at the same time.  This is definitely a technique which should have sashing between each block as it was rather fiddly having to trim back the wadding on each seam after the blocks were joined.

Thanks to the ladies at Craft Depot for helping me find the right combination of fabrics.

The right tool for the job

The other day I decided to look at the manual and actually use the 1/4" quilting foot which was provided with my Brother sewing machine.

If you line up the fabric to the marks and start/stop at the right place, not only do you get a 1/4" seam allowance along the edge, it also starts and stops 1/4" in from the ends of the fabric.  This means that when you are sewing cross joins, the back of the block ends up looking like it does when you hand quilt, and leaves less of a bump when it's pressed.

This also has the effect of producing perfectly matched seams on the front side!!

I don't know why I didn't try this before!  It just goes to show that these things are included with the machine for a reason.  I'm going to use this foot for all my quilts from now on, because it's not like it's hard to change the presser foot before sewing.  My poor industrial machine is having less and less uses.  I need to do more garment construction because he's brilliant at that.