Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Wednesday Sewing - Designing Pillows Part 3


This week I have the second pillow (pillow B) designed and the pillow top made.  Last week I showed you how I made the first pillow in what I'm calling my monsoon set - the thunderstorm side of monsoon.  This week I'll show you how to put together the hot side of monsoon - and very appropriate, as we are having extremely hot weather for this time of year.  115 degrees today with a forecast of 116 for tomorrow.  Hmmm ....


Materials:
*3/4 yard background material - includes material for pillow A
*fat quarters or fabric scraps
*Steam-A-Seam 2
*18 inch square pillow form
*patterns found here

If you remember from two weeks ago, this is the sketch I worked from for this pillow.


I decided to make a few changes.  Since this is the heat part of monsoon, I wanted everything to be very still - not much movement at all.  So now there are only two birds and they're standing very still.  Birds do that down here in the heat - sometimes we have a dozen in the shade under our trees, looking like statues.  I knew from the first pillow, that I needed a background, so I added a couple of curvy mountain ranges.  But since I'm going for stillness, I left them gently curving.  And I also added a cloud to tie this design to the one in pillow A.  The final change was moving the larger of the heat rays coming off the sun to the inside of the pillow - this was done mostly because it balanced the composition better.  It felt right.

1.  Follow the instructions from last week for transferring the pattern pieces to Steam-A-Seam 2 and then cutting out them out from fabric that I go over in last week's post.  Cut a 19 x 19 inch piece of background fabric, take the backing off the fabric pieces and begin arranging them using the picture below as a guide.


2.  Iron to set the pieces on the backing (about 15 seconds on cotton setting).  I used a blanket stitch to embroider around the raw edges.  You can do this or use a zigzag machine stitch.


Like on the clouds from pillow A, I did a two level blanket stitch on pillow B's cloud.


Next week we'll get these pillows put together!

Happy Creating!  Deborah

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