The pillow came out pretty much exactly as I had sketched it. Although, I made a mistake that I didn't catch until the pillow was completely finished. Can you see it? (The butterfly block on the right side of the second row was supposed to be in the middle position on the bottom row where the elephant block is and vice versa. But since the people I asked couldn't pin point the mistake, I decided to just leave it as is.)
For the back, I stitched a baby elephant holding its mama's tail onto some linen/cotton blend fabric, which I also used as the sashing on the front. I initially planned on using a yellow kei honeycomb dot for the other half of the back, but then decided those yellow elephants needed to be there instead.
My sister drew this cute little elephant for me and then I printed it out, traced it onto my fabric and tried stichery/embroidery for the first time. A girl in my quilt guild pointed me to the Stitch School blog, which has really great instructions for different types of stitches. I'm not into some of the traditional embroidery styles, but it will be fun to try other stitches on other projects.
So there you have it. It was so much fun participating in this swap. I hope my partner loves the pillow as much as I do...I almost didn't want to part with it.
