Finished Pillow

I thought I'd try to do some embroidery when we were down south last winter. I bought a kit that had several stitches I could try out. It stitched up really quickly.

There was lots of extra yarn left over but no dark brown was provided for the trunk so I left it as is.

Kristen Nicholas has similar patterns and offers a kit for her Circles Sampler Pillow with everything needed to make an 18" x 18" pillow except the hoop, backing fabric and piping, and the pillow form. If you don't like the turquoise fabric, you just need to let her know what colour you would prefer and she'll send it instead. For $46US, it's a good deal. You can't buy a finished designer pillow for that.

I blocked my embroidery last week and recently purchased the fabric for the backing, a 14" pillow form (with a discount coupon at Michaels), cording to make piping and bias tape to match the backing so I could make the piping.

After watching numerous videos on creating a pillow cover, I made one yesterday.

I used a contrasting fabric for the back.

Initially, I used that fabric for the sashing around the stitchery but it was TOO MUCH! I raided my stash and found a fat quarter of the plainer yellow fabric that just happened to match the piping. I carefully used my seam ripper to free the stitchery from the wild, printed fabric and cut strips from the plainer fat quarter and installed that sashing instead. That added about a half an hour to the project but I was pleased with the result. The salvaged sashing pieces are in my scrap bin and will find a life with some other project.

Making piping is really easy, especially using the bias tape, and a lot less expensive than buying it ready-made - if you can even find the colour you need. It's also very easy to make custom bias tape with bias strips of the desired fabric.However, the bias tape I selected was too wide so I had to trim it and got to use my 1/2" ruler for the first time.

The piping is first attached to the front of the pillow with raw edges matching. I then installed a lapped zipper on the back and trimmed the back to match the front. (I didn't get a shot of the flat backing piece with the zipper installed).

I could have used an invisible zipper but I thought that would be a bit difficult getting it to butt against the piping. It was really easy to just lap the larger piece over the smaller piece that had one side of the zipper attached. This video was really helpful outlining the steps for installing the zipper. The full video covering all the steps for making a pillow cover is here.

Then with the zipper undone part way and the right sides together, I stitched around the pillow back, again, butting right up against the piping I had attached to the front. I clipped the corners at a 45 degree angle and turned the pillow cover right side out. Voilà! It was finished.

I stuffed the pillow form in,

zipped it up and it was done.

Here it is with all its pillow friends.

I have a finished needlepoint kicking around somewhere in my 'office' that I need to unearth. I now have the confidence to be able to finish it  nicely into a pillow cover after acquiring appropriate backing and piping fabric.

Making and adding the piping was really easy. I'm glad I 'went for it' and got the pillow finished.