Experimenting with Curved Piecing

Mmmkkkk so straight up this is a post sharing the hardest thing I've made so far in my sewing experience. We had some friends getting married that are part of video gaming community that my husband is a part of. Ari had the idea that we should make them something with the logo of their group on it. I said "sure" not really thinking about it, but quickly kinda started to panic at how to approach this logo. We went with pillows as it seemed like a nice, homey, new couple type gift. I made sort of like a stencil of the logo, cut out all of the fabric and then quickly realized I had no freaking clue how to do any type of curved piecing. After lots of YouTube videos, yelling, wasted fabric, and a few moments of weakness where I almost gave up and went to pick up a gift certificate instead.....I made the dang pillows.

As you can kinda see in this photo, the fabric doesn't lay very evenly so I still have a lot of work to do in learning how to make things like this. The nice thing about pillows is that a large squishy thing is going inside so it helps kind of disguise that the piecing isn't totally flat.

I also sort of embroidered their gamer handles on the pillows. I just used hand quilting thread and not embroidery floss so it's not crazy noticeable from afar, but I think it's a nice small touch. The photo above is just me lining it out and chalk.

I don't mean to doubt myself or my abilities, but like...I'm really surprised at myself that I pulled this off! I definitely want to take some kind of class or guided project so I can get better at this kind of thing, but jeeze louise I'm pretty stoked about these pillows. I would love to hear if anyone else has good tips or experience with this kind of piecing work!