Last month I made the prettiest pillow to sit on my bed. I found this tutorial on Pinterest and I desperately wanted to make one. I wasn't even put off when I realised that I would have to make ruffles without a ruffler attachment for my sewing machine. After all, the tutorial says that you need to end up with a strip of fabric at least 9 feet long, so I figured that wouldn't be too hard. Yeah, it turns out that it should have said that you need a strip of fabric at least 9 yards long. I ended up cutting many many strips of fabric that added up to about 28 feet long.
I didn't take any in progress shots because honestly it's pretty easy to ruffle fabric (just a little tedious if you're doing lots of it!) You just sew 2 parallel lines of basting stitches along the entire length of the fabric (but make sure you don't backstitch the ends!), gently pull on the top threads on each side and move the fabric towards the middle of the strip. If that sounds a bit confusing, there's a very good explanation here. The most important thing is to loosen the tension of your machine first. I did a test run with the top tension as loose as it would go, but it was still too tight to gather without snapping the thread, so I had to loosen the bottom tension too, and that worked perfectly.
I love the way this pillow turned out. It looks so impressive, but it was really quite easy to make.
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| I'm 29 and I still sleep with a teddy bear. Go ahead and judge me, I don't care. |
Obviously, being male I have little appreciation for cushions. But even I can tell that it is a very nice cushion! I hope Andy doesn't get jealous of your Teddy Bear.
ReplyDeleteTut tut Matthew, you're repeating ridiculous gender stereotypes there. Andy's just as male as you are and he has a lot of appreciation for cushions :-p Seriously though, there's nothing inherently female about liking soft furnishings. If you're not interested in them that's obviously fine but the only reason your gender has anything to do with it is that society has decided that men *shouldn't* be interested in these things, and you've absorbed that message. I'm glad that you think my cushion is nice though :-)
DeleteThankfully Andy isn't at all jealous of my teddy bear. I'd have a hard time chosing between them if he was!