Quilting Failure & the Origin of Fabric Scraps

Hi all,
OMG I have literally just finished the 57-yoyo-project! Photos will have to be done tomorrow, I am exhausted! But it sure came out good :) Ok I know that is horrible English but am watching Conair so just imagine that sentence in a Nicolas Cage/Cameron Poe accent and it works quite well ;)

Anyway, September is nearly over and I wanted to show you where a lot of my scraps come from. It may be surprising but they actually come from one project! A few years back, my sister asked me for some quilted pillow covers. I had never quilted before so I didnt know about 'quilting quality cotton' and just bought some fun designs. I spent hours over the design and trying to cut the fabric (also new to the rotary cutter idea of course) and I sewed everything together. I didnt zigzag, I didnt use FrayCheck, and I didnt topstitch after sewing it all together. I did add lining, however, as I knew how much my sister loves to do laundry and the pillow covers might not last very long. This was the result:

I made 5 pillows in total, these are three of them (my favourite was the one on the right)

The other two

And a closeup of one of them as I used tiny squares on the edges and I wanted to make sure it was noticed ;)

Of course I bought waaay too much fabric, after all I had never quilted before, and now I have all these pieces left of fabrics that I normally really wouldnt use... The colour scheme I was given was simple: blues and greens and a bit of white. So not my colours! I think I did quite well for a first timer! Ok, maybe not for all of them but some of them came out really well :)

My sister loved them and put them on display immediately. But then..... she did the laundry... and this one time on Christmas Eve, when these pictures were taken, was the only time I have seen the pillows. I was told they completely came apart in the laundry. Even though I had lined them, the stitching didnt hold. *pout* Weeks of work down the drain...

So now that I have bought proper quilting quality cotton for my Halloween quilt (in it's 4th year of planning), I am not exactly what you would call confident in starting it. Any tips will be more than welcome! Am thinking zigzag/FrayCheck/topstitching at the very least! LOL... oh my... in the end it's a good thing we can laugh about it.

I ended up using the leftover fabrics for various projects such as the charger bag, lots of baby clothes, a flower and a makeup bag (also for my sister by the way) and some PJs of which I actually never took pics. I must ask my sister if she still has those! Now the fabric stash is slowly dwindling (at least that bit) so I'm really making progress :)

Ok, I'm off to bed, soon the pics of the big project will come!