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Friday, January 11, 2013

Round Bolster Pillow



Sometime back, around the end of November or early December, my friend asked to make a bolster pillow for the bench she recovered and put in her front entry. During our discussion of what she wanted, I kept leaning toward a round pillow. I don’t know why I wanted to make a round pillow so badly. Perhaps, because I never made one and wanted to try. She was game for it so that’s what we decided on.

I brought my machine over and got to work on the same day that we made our Christmas cards. You can see the post, Good Friends and Christmas Cards, on my other blog, Crazywonderfullife, for that story. She had everything I needed, fabric and cording, whew! long list, to make the pillow, so after lunch I got started on that.











First, I took some measurements to determine the size of the pillow. She wanted it to be the whole length of the bench, and not too big around, so people could still sit comfortably to put shoes on.

Next, I cut strips of the fabric and covered enough cording to go around both ends of the pillow. I had to determine the circumference of the circles of fabric that would be sewn on the ends. There is a mathematical equation for that, but I just used my measuring tape and measured around the outside of each circle.






I also needed to know the circumference to determine what size rectangle I would need for the body of the pillow. The long side was the length of the bench and the short side was the circumference of the end circles.

The third step was sewing the covered cording to each of the short sides of the rectangle.



You will come to know that my photography skills are seriously lacking. I may or may not choose to change that in the future.

After that, I pinned the round end pieces to the short sides of the rectangle. She wanted the reverse side of the fabric to show on the ends so it was right side to wrong side. I found out that my rectangle was to big so I unpinned everything and remeasured and trimmed it down to the correct size.

This time, I folded the rectangle in half, long side to long side, and right sides together and sewed that together first, leaving an opening for turning and stuffing.



Now, I pinned the ends on again, keeping in mind that the wrong side of the fabric needed to face out when finished, and sewed the ends on. I trimmed what needed to be trimmed, turned it right side out and stuffed it with polyester stuffing.

I sewed the opening together by hand and voila! a round bolster pillow for ze bench.



Not bad for a first time with no pattern or instructions.

Next time, I’ll show you a quilt that I’m making for my cousin. For a sneak peek at the work in progress, go to Quilt In Progress. Until then,

Happy Sewing!

Julie



1 comment:

  1. My computer is giving me fits! I have no idea why the pictures don't show up, but I'm working on it. Thanks for your patience.

    Julie

    ReplyDelete

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