Pillow Talk

Sew, sew, sew. I finally finished my throw pillows for our chairs in the living room! I bought this fabric probably 2 months ago, then realized I wanted the pillow covers to have invisible zippers, which lead to a further realization that the sewing machine I am borrowing from my sister-in-law doesn't have a zipper foot... so I ordered the Coats and Clark set of invisible zipper feet on Etsy since it was cheaper than Amazon after shipping. It took me over 3 weeks to run out of patience and write the person and ask them where my purchase was... turned out it hadn't been shipped and had slipped underneath a seat in her car...whoops! So a few days later I received my package with a note inside apologizing for the delay. It took me another week to get the motivation to try on the zipper feet, none of which worked.

My brilliant husband then suggested that I sew in the invisible zippers by hand. I seriously lack logic sometimes so to me this was a genius idea! Not only did it work out but it saved me the headache of trying to seam rip out stitching in my zipper which is inevitable for me whenever I sew a zipper in. It did take me about 40 minutes to sew in each zipper, but I did it while watching my newly-discovered favorite show of the moment, Ally McBeal.

So after 2 days (one pillow per day during Ella nap time, also known my time to let the creative or slacker juices flow) they were done! That day we had 5 friends over including 2 female friends and no one noticed or bothered to mention my pillows :(. I was really hoping they would because I'm so proud of them! Without further ado here are my lovelies sitting pretty on our chairs:

The print is actually a knit and is a hounds tooth plaid which made it a bit tricky to not only match up but also prevent the sewing machine from stretching the knit so that my carefully pinned plaids no longer lined up front to back. I had originally bought pipping for them, but since they did not have gray I bought white and then decided I might like them better without pipping rather then settle for white, but I'm sure they would look good either way.

I already had the pillow inserts, which were 18". I cut each piece (4) to be 18" by 18" which may sound like I didn't leave any room for seam allowance, but it actually helps the fabric to snugly hug the insert and keep you pillows looking plump rather than frumpy and sagged. I could have even cut the fabric smaller or had a larger seam allowance as mine were not as tight and they could have been.

I bought slightly more than 1 yard and at 44" width I still enough leftover material to make another pillow but you could buy just one yard and have enough to make 2 pillows. The fabric I found was on the clearance isle at Jo-ann's at $10/ yard. I went back 7 days later and they were having a 50% off sale on all clearance (it was St. Patty's day weekend, they usually do this around the holidays) so I drove home grabbed my receipt and got refunded for the difference in cost of all the fabric I had bought a week prior. This made the total only $5 for a yard of fabric and about 2.50 per zipper.

I bought some other fabric the day I bought the above fabric to make throw pillow covers for our couch and plan to have those done soon!