The Other Pillow Pattern

The Windowbox Pillow was the featured pillow on our recent bloghop with Moda, but the Cuckoo Pillow is super cool too…

If you’re interested in downloading the instructions for our Cuckoo Pillow Pattern… I’ve just uploaded it to our website so that you all can get it as a PDF. To download it directly, click here. If you want to check out all of our free patterns that are available for download, you can visit our Free Patterns Page here.

This pattern would totally work with other fabric lines too, but I think that it’s neat how Hideaway became our jumping off point for its design, because in it, you’ll see that the cuckoo house, the little bird, as well as the tree that we’ve appliquéd on the back, all can be found in our Damask print.

We were actually told to keep the cuckoo clocks to a minimum… so this fabric is the only one that has the actual clock in its entirety. Which you can see below.

The Damask took a truly ridiculous amount of time to draw up. But I love it!

It gives me butterflies!

My mom and I really enjoy including fun little surprises, so I’ve gone ahead and labeled most of said surprises in the diagram below. I think it’s probably obvious that the cuckoo clock was our central theme… which you can see here in the center of each repeat. But we did try to take this further by exploring some of the more subtle aspects of this visual style. The stand on which the clock sits… turns into an abstracted set of deer antlers… And out of these antlers grow 6 trees, two sprigs of pine cones, and some small, folky-styled flowers.

Since we were shooting for a line that was Swiss inspired… we drew some of our inspiration from Pennsylvania Dutch Hex signs (small circular signs that the Amish / farmers in the area will hang on their barns to ward off bad luck). My mom grew up in Amish Country PA… And I’m now living very close to that area myself… so it was easy to become intrigued by this charming style of illustration. (Not to mention the fact that I will often times buy into these odd superstitions myself.) The birds that make up one of the main focal points in this print are known as the Distelfink, a.k.a. the gold finch… and in Amish culture, they symbolize good luck and happiness.

Beneath our pair of Distelfinks are some little eggs sitting within a stylized nest which we’ve embellished with a series of clock hands on either side. Directly above the birds is a heart (another token Hex sign symbol) within which is a small keyhole from which a little cuckoo bird is popping out its head. There are also some clock pendulums that are swinging beneath this heart.

The final little surprise is our spiderweb hidden in some of the branches. We decided in our first line that we wanted to have a secret little “Easter Egg”… and that has since become our spiderwebs that we try to cleverly work into a few patterns in each of our lines. If you want to read the entire story on these, you can check out our Easter Egg entry here… In both Botany and Hideaway you can find them in three separate patterns each.

And I think that’s about all I’ve got for this one! I hope you all enjoy!

Ohh! And if anyone has tried to contact me through our Contact Us page on our website and you haven’t heard back from me… that would be because our contact page has been a tad broken these last few weeks. I’m still trying to figure out what the problem is, but in the meantime, please contact me using the contact link here on our blog (the blue button at the very top of the page (after you’ve clicked on the “L+J Blog” title up at the top).