Sunday

Reading Pillows

Earlier this year a friend had asked me to make reading pillows to sell in her shop. I tried to make one up as a sample to send her and I just didn't like how it turned out. I altered it a few times and no matter what I did it was not acceptable. 

With a craft fair coming up soon, I thought I would give it another shot. I had this idea to use up novelty fabrics I had lying around. So I picked out my half-yard cuts. I chose some camping-themed fabric for my first try and I had this idea to use my embroidery machine to make the front pocket.

I didn't use a big enough piece of fabric so I ended up adding a band to the top and bottom to make it large enough. It really gave it a nice finished look. 

I used a free online tutorial to make the pillow. It helped me determine the right sizes for the pieces. The only real change I made is instead of using fiberfill stuffing, I used a pillow form. That meant I had to make a overlapping back piece to insert the pillow form. I discovered that was what I needed to do to improve my original pillow. It was the lumpy-looking fiberfill that was unacceptable. The pillow form really made a difference. 



Even from the back, the pillow had a nice finished look. Now that I solved the quality control issue, I needed to make some more. I had so much fun matching embroidery files with my fabrics that I ended up making a bunch more so I went on Amazon and ordered a bunch of pillow forms. 


While looking through Etsy for embroidery files I came across the cutest bird file. I fell in love with it. And now that I'm gaining experience with my machine, I conquered this file with over 34,000 stitches. It took a few hours to stitch out but I sure had fun with the colors. I chose them from the colors in the Tula Pink fabric scraps I had leftover from a quilt I made last year.



I made this little beauty into a reading pillow as well. 


I will put this one up for sale along with all the others, however this one will be a little more expensive. I'm not so sure any of these will sell but if they don't, I can always ask my friend who owns the boutique if she would like to put them up in her shop. It feels like a good business plan.

Wooden Gnome-like Santas

I used to do a lot of wood crafts. In fact, I sold many of them at craft fairs. I don't know what made me stop, but it's been years since I dabbled in woodcrafting. I saw a photo on Pinterest of these wooden gnome-like Santa and I thought I could certainly do that without purchasing a pattern or instructions.


After a some thought, I drew multiple sizes of triangles on paper using my 10-degree quilting ruler. I cut them out to get a real visual of the sizes I wanted to make. I then determined the base sizes from scraps of wood my husband had lying around his woodshop.  When he saw what I was up to he volunteered some pallet boards and dowels for the legs. I loved the idea of using pallet boards! This was going to be fun. It also made him clean up after himself so I had room in the workshop to cut on the bandsaw and sand my pieces. I did most of the work myself however I did ask Jeff to drill the holes for the dowels. After painting the pieces, I glued them together and stained them. Once the stain dried I took them outside and sealed them with spray matte-finish sealer.

And viola...


The real fun was choosing buttons for embellishments.


They are ready for my craft fair next weekend. I can't wait to see how they fare. Then I will know if I should continue with woodcrafts. I hope they do well because I had lots of fun making them.