accessories

I tried to give really thoughtful gifts this year for Christmas.  I think I succeeded.  At least everyone is good at faking it if they didn't love them ;)  This is the gift I gave my mom.  

She is really into scrapbooking now and I found a tutorial online as to how to make these pillows and I just thought they went perfectly with that theme.  I borrowed a pillow from her sofa while they were out of town one weekend and picked out some fabric that matched the colors.  Then I traced out the size of the pillow and put it back before she was any the wiser.  I had to go back to the store twice to get enough trim to go around the edges-those are big pillows!

To make this project, I needed:

a profile photo

a letter sized print of said photo

a sharpie

scissors

fabric paint

a small paintbrush

a disappearing ink fabric pen

an iron

a scrap of fabric/towel

2 18" zippers

5 yards of trim

2/3 yard of back fabric

2/3 yard of front fabric

The fabric I bought for the front has a lining on it and was slightly stiff on the front so it made painting easier.  I got it out of the remnants bin so I have no idea what it actually is.  To make the profiles, I adjusted the photos in Photoshop to be black and white and higher contrast, since I only needed the outline.  Then I adjusted the size so they would print large enough for the 20x22" pillows, but still fit on one sheet of 8.5x11" paper.  Thankfully, they also turned out to be scaled about right in proportion to each other.   And I flipped one photo so they would be facing each other on the sofa.  I then traced the outline of each face with a sharpie on the printout and cut them out.  Next, I put those profiles onto the front fabric and traced around them with my disappearing ink fabric pen.  I had to fill in the edges with paint quickly though because the ink started to disappear after 20 minutes!  You would think that would be plenty of time, but tracing around an entire head and then trying to be carful to paint inside the lines took a lot of time!  I had to do two coats of paint, which meant it took 2 whole days just to do the front because they needed to dry 24hrs before you applied another coat or set them with the iron.  I then sewed the pillows together and it took forever again.  I ended up sewing through the middle of the trim (I bought a braided one) to be sure the fabric part of the trim didn't show; my sewing machine is still mad at me and I did break a needle.  And man oh man were the zippers ever hard to get right.  I was trying to copy what the sofa manufacturer had done on her old pillow covers, but of course, I only have a regular sewing machine, so there was lots of seam ripping and trying again going on ;)  They turned out great I think and they were certainly a surprise.  Hopefully she really does love them as much as I do!