One of a Kind Pillow Again!

I love to sew and love to take items that were meant for one thing and give them a new life with a new purpose.

I do that with fabric napkins and also doilies.

Doilies that want to be a pillow

I got this set of two doilies quite awhile ago in fact it's been so long I can't even remember what I paid for them. When I purchased them I had in mind that they would become a pillow. One doily for the front and one for the back.

After deciding to use these doilies for a pillow I then went on to decide how the pillow would look. First off I wanted ruffles on each end. The perfect fabric for that was my black and white toile fabric that I had aged with a tea bath.

I also knew that I wanted a bird image in the center on the front of the pillow and I went looking for that at The Graphic Fairy. So my design idea was all set and all I had to do was just get it done.

These doilies were an odd size so a standard pillow form wouldn't work and there was also the issue of holes in the embroidery design that I had to contend with. So a custom pillow form was needed.

Measuring the exact size of the doilies I used these measurements to make my pillow form with standard muslin fabric.

Pillow form waiting for stuffing

Now I could rant and rave about pillow stuffing and how much I use to hate making my own pillow forms because of the stuffing but all that changed once I started using Morning Glory Cluster Stuff. It's a light weight polyester fill that will not clump or cause lumps. I hate the lumps and this is why I use it. The one draw back is that the fill is so light weight that it feels like the pillow has no weight to it.

Morning Glory Cluster Stuff

Okay so the pillow form was made and now all I had to do was add the image I found at the Graphic Fairy

Graphic Fairy Image

I did some color correcting in my Photoshop program to give the image a bit more of sepia look.

I transferred the image onto the doily using transfer paper that I got from Dharma Trading  

 I ripped the black and white toile fabric at 4" with the intentions of having the ripped edges showing to give it a bit more........... look. (sorry can't think of the right word) Ruffled the fabric with my ruffle attachment and then added the ruffles to each end of the doilies.

With wrong sides together I then sewed all around the doilies using the decorative edge as my guide leaving approx 3" opening so that I could insert my custom pillow form.

Inserted the pillow form and then closed up that 3" opening.

I consider this one of my One of a Kind Pillows  but it does have a big flaw. The transfer of the image caused discoloration on the doily.  If you look around the birds your can see where I cut out the image on the transfer paper. It shouldn't look like this I really wanted it to look like the birds were directly printed on the fabric and not added afterwards.

Anyway it's done I've learned something from this but not sure how I can apply it to my next project but I learned.

I'm off to make some more pillows using transfer paper and napkins. Hopefully I won't be able to find any flaws in these.

My Burlap Pillow Done

Where do my ideas come from? Well alot of times I get inspired from items I see on Pinterest just like this item below. Do you not just love this pillow? Love, love, love  it.

Source

I love everything about this pillow but most of all I love the ruffles, possibly because it's burlap?  The creator of this pillow is Suzanne from Notes From The Patch and if you click on over to her web site you will find a great tutorial on how to achieve this look.  Love me some burlap and ruffles to beat.

So I had this ruffle in mind when I found the black and white toile at the thrift store. I wanted to do just like Suzanne did having the whole ruffle be exposed on the pillow. In other words not inserting it into the seam.

So I had that fiasco with the fraying burlap (You can read about that here)  and with all the seams after the pillow was finally done I just didn't think another seam on the outside of the pillow would look good. I just thought it might be too bulky.

So went to plan B though plan B wasn't plan B until plan A was a no go. I wanted to add that black and white toile I had which was the whole purpose of making a burlap pillow in the first place. So i decided to add the ruffle to the envelope side of the pillow. Actually I added it to the edge of the opening.

So I'm pretty happy with the way it looks. I did the ruffle and then I added the vintage black trim. I placed the pillow sideways which gave the ruffle an off centered look which I like.