Yesterday, my 7 year old granddaughter was finishing up a couple day stay with me, and as we were taking a break from the heat outdoors, to do a little work on the dollhouse furniture, she expanded the craft-time to ask me to sew a pillow for her with her name on it.
She loves that I sew, and always thinks up projects for me to sew for her when we go downstairs to the sewing area… Plus she really wants to learn to sew too, which I would love to teach her, so it’s a win-win situation.
Being the genius-creative little girl that she is, her wheels start turning just by looking at the pile of ‘stuff’ in my craft closet, so what started out as a little pillow for the dollhouse bed, was a fun transition for her into a personalized pillow.
Even though I don’t have anywhere near the same amount of ‘scrap’ fabric I used to when I was working full-time as an interior decorator, (I sewed for clients too) I still manage to accumulate a healthy pile above my craft supply boxes.
This pic was taken back in December when I was working on the Christmas pillows I showed you, and the ‘pile’ has grown a bit since then… So I’m always glad to use some fabric scraps for a project, makes me feel good about saving it.
Speaking of those Christmas pillows, you can see that when I sewed the felt designs on the face of them, I purposely used black thread to give it a ‘homespun’ feel…
but for my granddaughter’s pillow, we did it in a thread that matched the felt so the stitches just blend away. This is a super close-up of the completed letters.
Here’s a little tip:
First I drew up the letters on paper, cut them out, then laid them face down on the felt and traced around them with a sharpie… that way the marker lines are on the bottom, not the face of the felt letters.
After I cut out 2 squares of fabric for the pillow front and back, we arranged the letters in a few styles on the face fabric until she decided she liked them best just straight in the center.
Here they are all pinned ready to go to the sewing machine…
Just super quick, I zig-zagged around all the edges of the letters, carefully not moving them from their pinned spots.
Then changing the stitches to straight I sewed the 2 square pillow pieces, front to back, inside-out. My granddaughter turned it right side out, carefully poking her finger in the corners. Her favorite part was stuffing them with the fiberfill stuffing.
And finally, we whipped stitched the bottom closed. I held it the pillow and she stitched with my guidance… Well she mostly just did the dollhouse pillow’s stitching, and I did the big pillow, as by then she had moved on to playing with the dollhouse pillow in the dollhouse.
There it is all done! Seriously, I think it took me longer to write about it, than it did to make it.
And she’s thrilled! She was so tickled to fit it into her overnight bag to get it home to set on her bed.
Hopefully it will be an inspiration for her to continue creating and working on her sewing skills.
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I appreciate you stopping by.
