Quilted Cushion Cover

I had an idea the other day that it might be fun to try and make a mosaic quilt using squares. But instead of making an entire quilt, I decided on a cushion cover for my first attempt. I drew up my design on a piece of paper and coloured the squares to decide how I wanted my cushion to look. I decided on a relatively simple design that used only 5 colours. I planned each square to be 1 inch wide, so my design ended up 13 by 13 inches.

The initial design plan

Before I got any further in my planning, I spoke with a friend who told me about an inspired way of sewing hundreds of tiny little squares together. So I cut all my fabric strips 1.5 inches wide and then cut them again into 1.5 inch squares for use in my design. Here comes the amazing part... I then laid out my whole design onto iron-on light weight interfacing and pressed it in place.

The squares stuck on the interfacing

With my design stuck firmly in place, I could then simply fold down each row and stitch the back seam in place in one go. No playing with individual squares.

You can see on the images above the rows of vertical stitching. I then carefully pressed all of these seams in one direction. (This was the tricky part as the interfacing didn't like being ironed and wasn't very compliant).
Once I had the design laying nice and flat, I simply sewed across all of the horizontal seams.

Again, these were very difficult to press firmly in place, but eventually the design sat flat and neat. I then cut off the excess interfacing. Notice how all the seams are perfectly aligned and the squares are actually square... I'm sure this is due to the ingenious method of backing the design onto interfacing.
To finish my cushion cover I added a border in the purple and a button held back.

Purple border 2.5 inches wide

Three buttons to hold the back closed

The finished cover

I'm incredibly impressed with the end result and will not hesitate to use this technique again for other work of a similar nature. If the finished product was to be larger, the mosaic would look amazing and the design possibilities are endless!