FREE pillow project

Happy Tuesday!

I noticed a free Thanksgiving design on the Urban Threads website, so of course I wanted to give it a try. Plus, the nice folks at SVP (Singer, Viking, Pfaff) sent me a brand new Huqvarna Viking Designer Ruby machine for the office, so I had to try it out.

I chose the largest design (8.88″w x 5.82″h), but it is available in three sizes in case you want to make something smaller. Here is how the design stitched out.

I used tear-away stabilizer and orange rayon thread from Sulky, but this would be pretty in a rust/red or even a metallic thread, too.

The background fabric is a heavyweight home-dec fabric, which isn’t ideal for a comfy pillow per say. But it was what I had laying around the sewing room in the office, so I used it. Plus, I had enough for a matching pillow front and back. I had an 18″ square pillow form, so I cut two 19″ squares for the pillow front and back and used 1/2″ seam allowances to construct it.

I wanted to insert an invisible zipper along the lower edge, but I didn’t have one long enough for the pillow. And the only zipper color I had that remotely matched was gold, so that’s what I used!

Notice that the new fancy machine is sitting on top of a Gidget cabinet from Arrow. Love it!

Here is the zipper being topstitched along the pillow back.

This zipper should be inconspicuous enough, although an invisible variety would have been preferred. I figure it’ll only be displayed for a couple of weeks, and no one should inspect my zipper handiwork.

I sewed up the remaining three pillow sides (making sure the zipper was open halfway), turned it right side out through the zipper opening and gave it a good press from the back side.

Here is the finished pillow.

I admit this would be better with some orange piping, an invisible zipper and perhaps some more decoration. But I kind of like it plain as is. Plus, it only toook me 10 minutes to sew it up once the embroidery was complete, so I’m quite content with the final result.

What will you make with this design? Post photos of your finished creations at facebook.com/creativemachineembroidery! Hurry–the design is only free until Nov 20.

Happy Early Thanksgiving!