Week 14: Strawberry Pillows

Strawberry Pillows from The Purl Bee
Photo courtesy of The Purl Bee

The other day I was shopping at the local chain grocery store and was lamenting over the selection of out-of-season tomatoes.  I tell ya, there's nothing like the smell of homegrown tomatoes freshly plucked from the garden.  But we're not at peak tomato season yet, so I've had to console myself by browsing through the local farmers' markets.  We're lucky here in Northern California to have so many farmers' markets to choose from.  On some days, we actually have more than one to choose from!

A few weekends ago we headed over to the Sunnyvale Farmers' Market.  It's a pretty good sized market for this area, large enough to attract enough families to entertain the people-watching Darcy, yet small enough for us to have time to check out all the booths before Darcy gets cantankerous.  We were halfway through the market and had passed a handful of vegetable vendors, several citrus vendors with their ubiquitous orange-slice samples, and a few flower vendors with their tulip and daffodil bunches, when I a flash of red caught my eye.  Could it be?  YES!  There they were, crates and crates of strawberries!  Strawberries as red and shiny as a fire engine, in all different sizes!  There were small strawberries hardly larger than raspberries, medium-sized strawberries perfect for a pie, and, if you can believe it, strawberries as large as apples, so huge that you'd need both hands to eat them!  Of course we had to buy a few baskets, and they were deliciously fragrant and juicy!

The huge berries reminded me of an adorable project I saw from The Purl Bee, Strawberry Pillows.  Yup, you read right!  Gigantic strawberries that you can hug and cuddle!

I'll be making two pillows, one using fabric from Connecting Threads' Cheep Talk and Sweet and Sour collections, and another using patchworked fabric from American Jane's Recess collection.

I've got a ton of stuffing left over from my Biscuit Quilt, so hopefully this project will use up the rest of it.  There's a little bit of machine sewing, but also some hand sewing.  It looks to be an easy project, and looks pretty quick for the most part.  I think the hand sewing will take up the most time, but that's okay, because after all that work I can celebrate with a nap with my new Strawberry Pillows!