It’s no secret I love Elizabeth Hartman’s critter patterns – I’ve done a ton of them.  She recently offered her Koala pattern for sale with all proceeds going to the fire relief effort in Australia and I snapped up a copy.  I wasn’t up for making a whole quilt so I decided to recover a few pillows instead.  These pillows were also a great opportunity to practice some quilting.  I took a few classes from Jodi Robinson, both at QuiltCon and online, so I really enjoyed trying out a few designs.

Here are the finished pillows:

Here’s the purple guy – I had fun doing an echoed meander as a filler:

and the blue guy.  I missed a few pieces where the face meets the ears so he looks either surprised or like he’s missing his eyebrows (do koalas have eyebrows?)

I did a lot of playing with the quilting on the pillow back pieces.  This was my first envelope back and I liked the technique.

One back:

and the other:

The quilting was a lot of fun, and I will use these designs again.  If you get a chance to take a class from Jodi, do it!