Pillows for Stevie's kids for Christmas

I know this isn't strictly knitting, but I thought I'd throw it in.

In my family, we draw names for Christmas.  I got my sister Stevie, who happens to have 5 kids.  I thought I'd make pillows.  My friend, Amanda Wilding, taught Timmy's Sunday school class a couple of years ago, and made a cute embroidered Y pillow for him.  And he loves it!  He carries it around everywhere and actually rubbed off the embroidery and  I had to re-embroider it for him.  So I thought Stevie's kids might like pillows.  I'm making one for Ethan, too.

First, I shopped for fabric.  I found the cutest little quilting store right by my work.

I started by embroidering the squares.  I free-handed the Y's and the kids' names, but I got an iron-on pattern for the girls' butterflies.

Then I added a border to the embroidered squares and completed matching patterns for the backs of the pillows.  Measuring everything exactly (and twice) is really important, as well as ironing, at each stage.

At this point I added batting and some spare cheap fabric and quilted the squares.  I'm not sure if it makes a difference.

For the girls' butterflies I covered some rope with fabric and sewed it together.

Then I squared them up and sewed the backs to the fronts, right sides together, with the ropes in between. I didn't put a rope around Adam's pillow, because the first pillow was hard.  But then I figured out how to change the position of my needle and the ropes got easier.  I left a space to stuff the pillows (I only have 3 of the 6 done to this point). 

Once the pillows were stuffed, I sewed that extra space together.

I've got 3 more to finish up.  And I might fill in Stevie's boys' Y's with some kind of embroidery pattern, but I'm not sure I'll have time with all of the other holiday projects I have going.