Friday, March 13, 2015

A Flowery Pillow

More wedding sewing, I decided to make throw pillows with left over fabrics to coordinate with the quilt, here's the first one using a cute and simple idea from Angela Walter's website.
I purchased a 14" pillow form and made a white cover for it using fabric left from the quilt. There's a helpful tutorial by Julie Herman at sewmamasew with detailed directions for pillow making and pillow covers.
The flower for this pillow uses circles of fabric, folded once……...
 then twice.
 I used a 5.5" template to cut the circles and also to mark a circle in the center of the front of the pillow cover as a guide. 
There are 5 different colors in this "flower"- Row#1 needed 12 petals -  arrange them around the circle overlapping each one, then pin in place and stitch down. Be sure to place the petals with the fold on the same side or it will not look nice.
9 petals in Row#2, stitch down.
8 petals in Row#3, stitch as before
8 petals also in Row#4, I used two different yellow fabrics-stitch them down.
6 petals in Row #5, stitch down the final petals and you are almost done. I tried a button in the center, not really liking it, so I took it off but the pillow does look good with the quilt. The number of rows is not fixed, depending on the size of the circles and the flower, the number of rows may differ, this is what worked for me I liked how full it was.
Then I tried this little yellow flower and I do really like that, the little button is just one I pulled from my big jar of buttons.
I had searched for small yellow "silk" flowers with no success so I decided to make my own with this flower head from Joann's, I just popped them off their little stalks!
Stack up a few until it looks nice and full, pin them together and stitch all through the center with matching thread. Staggering the petals in each row makes it look more realistic.
Perfect! Solves the problem very nicely, as they say "necessity is the mother of invention".

2 comments:

Heather said...

Well done on the designer pillow. Great use of the silk flower and button to finish it off.

Andee said...

Goes great with the quilt!