Cathedral Winows

For my mom's birthday this year I wanted to make her some pillow shams that would coordinate with the quilt she keeps on her bed.  This quilt is full of curves and arcs in soft pastels.  Now, I have done some curvy quilt piecing with the Double Wedding Ring pillow shams that I made last year... but while I was researching curvy patterns I found a tutorial for beautiful Cathedral Window blocks.  This particular pattern is elegant and graceful and yet it is made from folded squares!

I found a great tutorial here by Shruti from the blog 13 Woodhouse Road.  I made 24 squares per pillowcase, and with each square being 4" they were easily combined into queen-sized shams!

Folding and ironing all 48 of those squares proved to be a very time consuming task... I think I watched nearly an entire season of Downton Abbey on Netflix!  But once I had the squares sewn together, sewing the arcs around the colored patches went rather smoothly.

However, not all of the points lined up perfectly, and being a perfectionist I decided that adding buttons to each point would hide any imperfections and add some additional interest and texture.  I found a variety of white and off-white buttons in my stash and decided that the randomness would complement the handmade, patchwork design scheme.

Of course, I didn't realize how long it was going to take to add buttons... sewing on a total of 78 buttons took about 7 hours!  But the end result was definitely worth it and my mom loves her gift!

...and Noel loves them too!