Sometimes, an idea pops into your head and it doesn’t leave until you’ve made it a reality. That’s what happened with this ribbon initial pillow. Now, as we all know, there’s not much out there that hasn’t been done before…but I’d like to think I came up with this on my own 🙂 I didn’t take a lot of pictures of the construction, because I really wasn’t sure how it was going to turn out, but I think I have enough for a pretty good tutorial if you are interested…
Materials:
pillow fabric
ribbon
sewing machine
heat n bond (straight pins will work as an alternative)
Step 1: Cut out your pillow fabric. I make simple envelope style pillow covers almost exclusively now…but that’s a tutorial for another day 🙂 If you’ve never made a pillow before, there are lots of good tutorials out there, but I find making envelope pillow covers easy and crazy-fast. On the front of your pillow, draw (using an erasable quilting marker or pencil), an outline of your initial. Cut out your initial.
Step 2: Gather your ribbon (this part is fun)!
Step 3: Now, you need a way to secure the ribbon to the back of your initial so that it doesn’t slide around during sewing. I tried using pins at first, but didn’t feel like it was as secure as I wanted. I then tried using heat n bond, which worked perfectly! I simply cut a piece of heat n bond, applied it to the back of the pillow fabric, placed the ribbon down, and set with an iron.
This is what it looked like once all the ribbon was secured….
….and this is a picture of the front of the pillow…
Step 4: Carefully and slowly, stitch around the outside of your letter. If you have a letter with a “middle” piece (A, D, P, etc.), stitch that in next.
Step 5: Sew your pillow together, stuff, and you’re done!
Looking back on it, I think it would look really cute if I had hand stitched an outline of the letter with some embroidery thread…but, either way, I love how this turned out!