Another day, another cushion

A couple of days ago, I remembered about Pinterest – I set up an account on there ages ago, and made some boards and did some pinning, then forgot about it, largely because I bought an ipad and couldn’t find an easy way to pin from Safari, and because their app didn’t seem to do what I wanted it to.

But something inspired me to open the app again, and it’s lots better now. I also did some googling, and found how to add a ‘pin it’ button to my ipad bookmark bar, so I can pin things I find as I wander round the internet. I’ve gone a bit bonkers, pinning and repinning lots of things – apologies to anyone who follows me and is overwhelmed, it’ll calm down soon! I’m Minniemoll over there too, if anyone who doesn’t follow me wants to. Oh, and feel free to pin things from my blog if you want to – I know some people don’t like it, but I’m happy to be pinned!

Anyway, one of the things I found and pinned was a link to this tutorial, for an easy way to piece small squares of fabric, and yesterday afternoon I couldn’t resist sitting down and having a go. I found some scraps of the fabric I used to make flowers in the summer, and cut out 25 2” squares, five in each design. Then I cut a 10” square piece of fusible interfacing, and arranged the squares on it.

I ironed them on, then did the first row of seams, just folding the fabric right sides together at every join.

I trimmed the very edge of each seam – I started using a rotary cutter to just cut off a bit, which worked well for the edge seams, but not so much in the middle, where there was too much bulk under the ruler to hold it straight, so I used a pair of very pointy scissors instead.

And ironed the seams flat. I know you usually press them to one side for quilting, but I think that would make too much bulk, with the interfacing as well.

I then repeated the process with the other set of seams, and hey presto! A set of perfectly lined up squares with very little effort – just eight seams and a bit of ironing.

Of course I then had to think of something to do with such a pretty thing, and a bit of digging found some offcuts of plain white fabric, so I gave it a border, attached some wadding, and quilted the border, to make the front of a cushion.

Apologies for the photos above, by the way – I was snapping them on my phone, and it was a bit dark and murky yesterday.

I thought I had enough plain white to make a back for the cushion, but I didn’t, so I did a similar thing, but with a single piece for the centre. Then I sewed the two halves together, leaving a gap on one side, inserted the inner, and hand sewed it closed – I thought about putting in a zip, but I couldn’t be bothered.

And this is the finished thing.

You can see the quilting on this one – I used the darning foot for my machine, lowered the feed dogs, and swirled away. It’s not perfect, but it’s not bad, and it frames the lovely panel nicely. The centre panel is 7.5” square, and the cushion is about 15” square.

Read Full Post »

Back in my comfort zone

After yesterday’s disappointment with the skirt, I decided to treat myself by making a cushion cover with this gorgeous silk I bought from The Silk Route at the Knitting and Stitching Show in Harrogate last year. It’s a fat quarter of silk dupion and five 10” squares of various sorts of silk, and I’d had the idea of making a striped cushion with the five squares and using the fat quarter for the back. I picked up a couple of 16” x 24” cushion pads last time I was at Ikea, which seemed ideal, so I started planning.

My first issue was that the squares were only 10”, but I decided to use them for the centre section and use the fat quarter for the top and bottom. The second issue was that this square, whilst absolutely beautiful, was very very flimsy – the light stripes had hardly any substance at all, so I didn’t fancy trying to sew it. I thought about using some iron on facing, but I only had white, which was a bit harsh, so in the end I used bondaweb to attach it to some cream fabric.

Next I cut stripes to make random 1”, 1.5” and 2” strips (with a 3/8” seam allowance, to allow for the silk fraying).

And sewed them together – the colour sequence is repeated three times.

I ironed most of the seams to one side, but the ones with the backing fabric I had to iron open, otherwise there was too much thickness of the fabric. There was also quite a lot of fraying!

I trimmed the edges using my trusty rotary cutter (I couldn’t manage without it!)

And then sewed the edging silk fabric and the panel onto a piece of backing fabric to stabilise it all.

I love all the different textures in the silk.

I used iron on woven facing for the back to stabilise it, with wondaweb for the hems, and made it so it buttons up the middle – with hindsight it would have been easier to put the pad in if I’d put the buttons towards one end, but it did go in.

And this is the result! I’m extremely pleased with it, I’m sure it would cost at least £50 in John Lewis, and I paid about £15 for everything.

It’s more than made up for yesterday’s disappointment, every time I look over to it I smile :)

Now I just have to keep it away from little feet with pointy claws…

Read Full Post »