Echino Pillows

Posted on January 23, 2013 by oliver's fancy

And now to show you the few projects that I completed in anticipation of hosting a baby shower at my house. Of course, originally I had a huge to-do list that I wanted to complete but the reality of my pregnant state honed it down to just a few important items.

I bought this Echino Nico London fabric at on online clearance sale probably a year and a half ago with the idea that I would use it for pillows in my den area. I kept waiting to make the pillows because the hubs is making me some built-in bookshelves and these pillows were to be part of the window seat area. Well the bookshelf project is on a bit of a hold right now, but I decided to go ahead and make the pillows to spruce up that area a bit. The bookshelves will be built on top of this build-in cupboard (now hiding many of Oliver’s toys) and so I will just pull all the pillows to the middle window-seat area when they finally are finished. I la,la love how it turned out! I am a bit of a book nerd and have a love affair with England so this fabric suits me perfectly. I also had my sister come over and help me hang some art work and lanterns that I had sitting around waiting for this room to be completed. (Art work is by the very talented Mary Lekoshere) Now it looks like a cozy little space and I am so happy to have pulled this nook together. Ignore the fact that the pillows are sitting on raw boards- remember the whole work-in-progress fact and appreciate that there is at least one part of this project completed. I need to take some more pictures in the later afternoon because the sun was shining directly in the window- making it impossible to get a shot of the entire wall but I think you get the general idea.

I have about a yard of the tan London print left over as well as some nice-sized scraps of the other prints so I hope to make a quilt for the day bed also located in this den to really pull the room together. As a final note, I highly recommend this linen-cotton blend fabric as the perfect weight for pillows! It sews like a dream and creates a nice thick, but not too heavy pillow cover! Also I am lazy and create envelope backs for all my pillows! Super easy and you don’t have to fiddle with zippers, buttons or hand-sewing.

New Pillows for Mom, part 2

Posted on August 7, 2012 by oliver's fancy

I have finally finished the pillows for my mom’s living room. Here is a picture of her living room with all 4 new pillows. I really like how well they complement the room.

These brown pillows have a long history. Last year for Mother’s Day my sister-in-law had the fabric monogrammed, and I made pillows out of them. In order to save some money, we used pillow forms from some pillows my mom currently had in her living room. Big mistake! These were not normal pillow forms and I had to re-sew the pillows quite a few times trying to get them tight enough to the pillow. They still ended up being kinda lumpy and I had to put button holes in the back of them to make the envelope closure stay closed. Unfortunately, I made the button holes too big so they just looked kinda tacky. All in all, not a very satisfying project, but I had spent too much time and money on them to change them at the moment (plus i had a brand new baby which meant no time for sewing) so they sat in her living room for a year. With the advent of the blue pillows a few weeks ago, we decided to redo the brown ones (finally!). My mom bought some much smaller pillow forms, and I seam ripped the pillows and cut them down to size…much better now! I was hoping to not have to seam rip since there were about 4 lines of stitching around the pillows, but I needed to use part of the seam allowance in order for the envelope closure to be wide enough, so I watched some Olympics this week and ripped my little heart out.

The fabric used is a brown micro-suede. For future reference, I would not recommend this fabric for pillows because it shows all dirt and sticks a bit funny to the pillow form- lots of static, but I made it work for this project. I wish I had a picture of the before pillows to show you, but I forgot to take one before I fixed them. Just take my word for it that these look much better than the previous ones!

New pillows for mom

Posted on July 18, 2012 by oliver's fancy

Yesterday I finished a quick project that I want to share with you. My mom had picked out some fabric for new pillows, and I have let it languish around my craft room for a few weeks. Once I actually sat down to make the pillows yesterday, they came together so quickly that I wondered why I took so long to begin them! I made simple square 20″ pillows with an envelope back and I used this tutorial from Sew, Mama, Sew to figure out how wide to make the back panels. It’s a great resource to have when you are making pillows! The change I made is to cut my pillows the same size as the insert (20″ in my case) and sew with a 3/8″ seam so the fabric fits nice and snug on the pillow form. The fabric is a Waverly upholstery print we picked up at Jo-Ann’s. The stiffness of the upholstery weight makes ironing over the inside seams so easy and they sew together beautifully! I really liked how professional the pillows looked when finished. The print and color matches perfectly with my mom’s living room and adds some needed pizzazz. Now I want to buy some more upholstery fabric and make myself new pillows! But first I must redo some other pillows I made for my mom a while back that turned out kinda rough…We used old pillow forms which were not square and it ended up being a rumpled mess with ill-fitting buttonholes. I will take a before and after shot of these so you can see the difference. Hopefully, it won’t take me another 3 weeks to finish them! 🙂