Fiber Dreams

It seems like forever since I’ve posted to my blog! I’ve been missing it, and was all set and ready to work on a post yesterday when I discovered the database error that Dave fixed up for me when he got home. Hooray, Dave!

Late last week a friend, Rachel, asked if I’d be willing to help out with a little project she’s been working on by way of making six pillows for her. Friday she brought over a pile of fabric, one of the pillow forms, and we got started. I hadn’t sewn anything real for years, so it was a slow start and included more chatting than actual work. Rachel set up the sewing machine that Dave so nicely carried upstairs for me, dragged out the iron and ironing board, and started cutting trim fabric into nice bias strips while I started planning, measuring, and cutting the fabric for the pillows.

Let me backtrack a little. You’ve met my friend Rachel before. She’s the interior designer who opened a new store, Path Design, that Dave and I helped to paint earlier this year. Rachel’s main emphasis, along with good design, is that the things she uses are environmentally friendly, or “green.” So, the fabrics she got for this project are all organic cotton. The print was designed by a friend of hers, Harmony of one was chosen for this project by Harmony’s teenage daughter. That a teenager chose the print for this project is Harmony Art, and this particular wildly appropriate as these pillows will be on a couch and chair (sitting area) that Rachel is providing for the Teen Choice Awards this coming weekend up in Los Angeles. Rachel will have photographs of the sitting area on her site later, you know, after it’s done. Right now she’s waiting for carpet tiles, couch, chair, and other assorted things to be delivered so she can set them up.

Back to the pillows. Like I said, I hadn’t done anything remotely like this, uh, sewing thing for eons. Years even. So I was a little slow to start. Another thing that slowed me down a bit was the fact that I’d never before put a cord around the edge of a pillow, and had no earthly idea how to do it. The Internet can be a fabulous place, you know? A few searches later, I came up with a nice, clear set of instructions for adding a corded edge to pillows, complete with pictures. Armed with my instructions, I set to work. Yes, I sewed a sample first, to make sure I could do it, and after that worked out so well, the real work began. I’d cut out about half of the pillow fabric on Friday. That being done, I sewed a couple of Rachel’s bias strips together, then wrapped them around the cord in preparation for pinning them to the pillow fabric. I thought I’d taken a picture of that step, but I guess I didn’t. Drat. Too late now. Moving slowly forward, after sewing the edging to the pillow top, I pinned the back of the pillow to the mix, and sewed that down.

A bit on the construction of these pillows. In addition to the corded edge, the green pillows have envelope backs. Because of a perverse quirk in my personality, though I love doing decorative embroidery I abhor hand sewing. Dave just shakes his head at me, and at the lengths to which I will go to avoid such tasks. Take the envelope-backed pillows. They take more fabric, and they take longer to prepare and to sew on a machine, but in making them this way I completely avoid any hand sewing. The results are so worthwhile. Plus, if I later want to do something silly, like wash the pillow, I just pull the pillow form out, and toss the cover in the washer and dryer. Viola! A madness to my method.

The last photo shows how the inside of the envelope-backed pillow looks. Here’s the back of one of the finished pillows.

The brown pillows, on the other hand, do not have nice envelope backs as there simply wasn’t enough fabric to make them that way. Drat! Another glitch with the brown fabric is that it was considerably narrower on one end than on the other, so two of the pillows are an inch smaller than the other four pillows. Once the pillows are safely stuffed and on the couch I don’t think it’ll be noticeable. I hope. What’s an inch, right? It’s not very much. It’s only two and a half centimeters. That’s hardly anything at all. Right? If worse comes to worse, Rachel can put the two small brown pillows on the couch, and the larger one over on the chair. No one will notice the difference then at all. Surely.

I did mange to get a clever picture of the edge of a sewn brown pillow before I turned it right-side out so you can see all the layers. There you have two layers of the bright green edging fabric between the two layers of brown denim fabric, sitting on top of two finished brown pillows on my dining room table. Then, because I love how things look in progress, here’s a photo of the last brown pillow being turned right side out.

You want to know something? It’s a lot easier to get the corners turned when the pillow has a cord around the edge. You just grab the cord and give it a little tug, and there you go. Nicely rounded corners. So much easier. I just might have to start making more pillows with corded edges in the future.

It took me all weekend to finish the first three pillows. I know. Pathetic, isn’t it? Once I got the rest of the bias-cut fabric strips from Rachel on Monday morning, though, things went a lot more quickly. I covered the cords, finished the fourth pillow, which was the final envelope style pillow, and pinned out the second brown pillow. Then yesterday morning I finished up the last two pillows, and took a few photos for you.

First off, we have the initial two pillows I made: one green print, one brown. Then the three green pillows, then the set of six. Before I took the final picture, I popped the envelope cover off of the pillow form, then stuffed the form into the smaller of the brown pillow covers. It was a bit of a struggle getting it in, but as you can see it worked just fine.

And no, now that you’ve asked, I haven’t sewn up the bottom edge of that brown pillow. We’ll see how much time I have today before Rachel comes to pick them up. I might get around to it. Or, per our agreement, I might just let Rachel do it since she’ll be doing the other two anyway.

One final thing. Rachel didn’t bring any thread with her, but that turned out not to be a problem at all. I got to be green and use old thread that my grandmother bought so long ago that the spools are made of wood. Grandma actually had saved thread from old projects she’d worked on all those years ago that worked quite well with this combination of fabrics. Yea Grandma!

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

Spam protection by WP Captcha-Free