experimenting with pillow patterns + new digs :)

What a boring pillow, no?

Yeah, I thought so too...

Back when I was a beginner seamstress... (ha! barely...) I would raid the clearance bin at JoAnn's. One day I found some shiny-purple-stripy-polyester nonsense for $2.50/yd. I bought 4 freakin' yards. Walking out of the store I thought to myself, "Who the hell do you think you are?" At least I had tons of room for making mistakes. Oddly enough, I haven't wasted hardly any of it. Just trimmings. The silvery fabric is also a poly blend that I found in the oops-already-cut-it-and-nobody-wants-it bin. These pillows were my first attempt at some serious sewing projects and so cheap to do... I never thought I would like them as much as I do.

This serious of pix are showing the process for just one of my couch pillows. It's a good thing that trigonometry was one of my best subjects in Math 3R.

Cutting these triangles was ridiculous. I had to make sure the angles were just right and that the stripes would line up once I was ready to sew them together... I wouldn't recommend working with stripes when you are still getting comfortable with your machine.

Actually, it wasn't so horrible... Now, getting myself to make sure the RIGHT SIDES of the fabric actually end up on the outside of the pillow cover, THAT'S my real problem.

This point was hard because it's hard to tell from the wrong sides if the stripes line up on the right sides.... because the right sides are facing each other during pinning.

FINALLY. I was pretty pleased with how well the stripes lined up. And I only needed to use my stitch ripper twice!

Below was the first pillow cover I made. No pattern, just started sewing pieces together and ended up with this:
Don't even ask to see the other end! I gave up and hand sewed the pillow form inside the "cylinder" cover. I decided I def need more practice at sewing curves and circles and whatnot. It is plenty obvious in person that this was created by an amateur but DON'T even dare look for the evidence in this picture! It took more time to place the pillow just so and take its picture so as not to reveal how poorly made it is than it did to actually make the effing pillow.

The next two pictures are the "front" and "back" of one pillow (I use quotes because I don't know which is the front and back). Both of these pillows were made from scraps leftover from making the above pillows.

The first one was a bit more on the planned-out side.

You can really tell in the bottom picture... Just started sewing pieces together!!

HONESTLY, I didn't know that the silver fabric would be an EXACT match to my new couch.In fact, I made these pillows well before I even considered buying a couch. Seriously. The couch looked so much more white in the picture online but that's what I get for not bringing my swatches with me to the store.

No, I did not pick out the color for the walls but I enjoyed its crazy uniqueness so much I decided to keep it. I can't even describe how much I love the contrast with the purple too! If you look really closely at any of the pillow pictures, you'll see the green thread making up some of the stripes... wtf, right?

Best part, my sister, mom, and I had so many ugly pillows lying around that I didn't have to buy any pillow forms!! Shwing!

Interested in where I'm living? Check it out for yourself!