Scrappy Pillow #1 DONE!

Yeh!  I had some 'spare time' and got a chance to finish #1 of 2 Scrappy Pillows.  This had been one of those projects that took a little longer than expected and put on the back burner.

For such a impromptu project, I think the pillows turned out much better than I expected, take a peak:


A closeup of the nearly made pillow. Recognize all the fabrics from my other projects? :)


This was one of the reasons why the pillow took me a while to make - trying to figure out how to sew on 'invisible' zippers.  The ones I had around the house were a little longer than the pillow, so I had to do some fancy tucking and cutting to get it to fit.



A little tucking and a little trimming and the zipper is finally ready for use.  This was a picture of the completed zipper installed - it was taken after I already sew on the binding, but you could still see the fancy tuck work on the far right of the picture.


I didn't have pillow inserts that fit the pillow, so I had to make some new ones.  This part went pretty quickly.  Here's a quick rundown of the pillow insert.

1) Cut two pieces of fabric about the same size as the pillow.
2) Sew 3 edges together, leaving the 4th edge open.


3) Turn right side out, so the 3 sewn raw edges are now in the inside of the insert
4) Stuff with whatever pillow stuffing you want - think I had a polyester filling.
5) Sew the 4th edge close - this could remain a raw edge, or you could do some folding to cover the raw edge before sewing it down

I kept the 4th edge unfolded.  I just use a straight edge stitch about 1/2"-1".


After the pillow insert is done, insert it into the pillowcase, zip and voila!


I like to use a pretty full pillow insert, giving the pillow an overstuffed look....nice and big and cuddly.

The pillow is nice enough to use in the living room for decoration, but for now it's in the boys room being used as a throwing toy :) haha what else is new right? :P

Here's a closeup of the binding I used around the pillow.  I machine sewed it to the BACK of the pillow and then hand bind it to the front.


A view of the back.  I used a flannel patterned cotton print.


Another 2 views of the pillow:

Horizontal Stripes?


or Vertical Stripes?

Scrappy Project Continues - Scrappy Pillow

For my scrappy project I decided to make a Scrappy Pillow.   It's also one of my Spring goals to make 2 items that are NOT a quilt this spring.

I made a strip about 14 yards of 2" wide straps. I cut the strip into 22" pieces.  This created about 32 pieces of 22" long and 2" wide fabrics.

I arranged the pieces together to make sure the same colors did not always end up on the same area on the pillow top.  

Making sure that the colors were arranged in a flattering manner.  At first I thought I had enough for 3 pillow tops, but after playing around with it a little I decided that it's better to make just 2 pillows - each a perfect square.

There were enough pieces to create two pillow tops - each 16 piece.  My goal was to have two perfect square pillows.  Just to make sure that there were enough strips to make a square, I only worked on one of the pillows in case I needed to make adjustments to the other.  The impromptu project :).

After sewing and pressing I had my perfect square!

I was so glad it worked out to be a square.  I didn't want to make the pillow any smaller since I wanted an over-sized pillow. To piece it together I used a generous 1/4" seam sew.  

This piece of the project was only the pillow top.  I wanted something more significant than the pieced part to be the pillow top.  I decided to sandwich the pillow top with some batting and add a packing to it - all JUST for the pillow top.

Measuring out the backing:

Then adding the batting in between the backing and pillow top:

What's next? Pinning the sandwich together for quilting, quilting and then decided which fabric to use for the back of the pillow and binding.  I also have to decide what to do with the pillow enclosure.  With kids I want to make the pillow top easy to remove in case I needed to wash it often.  Zipper?  Buttons? Velcro?  Not sure - I'll look around for ideas and hopefully I could finish up this project before spring ends :).

Going Through the Scrapbox

My scrap-box (aka the little brown box of leftovers) was getting a little crowded and I needed break from making big quilts.  So I emptied the box the examine the loot.  Here is what I found.

A nice pile of fabrics - ranges to about 3" to 10" pieces.  

Find that there were two main color themes in the scrap pile - light colored (whites, beiges, pinks) and earth colors (browns, reds, greens).  So I went ahead and divided up the piles first to evaluate what I have.  Turns out I have a lot of earth tones, so I decided to work with those.  Still not really knowing what I'm going to do with these scraps, I forged ahead and cut two sizes - 2.5" strips and 2" strips.

2.5" cuts on the left, 2" cuts on the right.

 The piles were done and I still have no idea what I'm going to make out of it, but I did know I wanted to keep it simple and small - I didn't have that much scraps.  So I decided to make a scrappy-strip pillow top.  I didn't really want to start measuring since this project as been so improv, I didn't want to start ruining that dynamic.

I decided to use the 2" cuts to make the pillow top - have no idea how many, or how big.  With no plan in mind, I decided to start assembling the 2" cuts to see how much fabric I actually have.

Assembling the 2" strips in chains.  Start with chaining together 2 pieces each.  Then cut the strings, then chain the chains together.  Keep doing this until you have one big giant piece.  Turned out I had about 14 yards of 2" pieces after it's pieced.

The chain.

Chaining the chains.

The results of hours of cutting and sewing and pressing.

The pieced 2" strip.  Ended up to be about 14 yards of fabric :).

Next I'll have to decided how big of a pillow top I want to make :P.  Hopefully I get more than one pillow out of this exercise.