Cute Idea

inspiration pillow

I want to male this pillow it will go with my new quilt. I found this on a craft blog called "H is for Handmade" I think it is my new favorite project. Too bad I have so much to do right now.

new quilt I must confess it is from Target but I love it and it was cheep

The Proses

The inspiration


The final product

but what happens in between? I thought I would give a glimpse into the creative process. This quit was a challenge. I had a hard time with the design. The pattered fabric was chosen for me and my a friend for her grandson's quilt. It is harder to form me to be inspired by fabric i didn't chose. The other challenge is that the fabric has a pattern of squares on it. I spent an hour on the computer over a few days trying to come up with a pattern that would not fight with the squares on the pattern. When I found the pink quilt on line it just clicked, I knew it would be the perfect pattern. So I opened Auto CAD (computer drafting program) it is meant for architectural and engineering drawing but it works for quilt patterns and I worked out the geometry of the pattern and drew up the pattern.


The Pattern

After I have the pattern comes the task of figuring out how much fabric I need and what is the best layout to be efficient when I am cutting out the fabric. It start with counting all the squares in the quilt. Then how many of those can I get out of a 45" wide piece of fabric. Well it is boring to talk about, so all I will say it is tedious but necessary before I can cut out the pieces. Then come the cutting and sewing and yada yada yada you have a quilt.

T shirt quilt

This quilt is made from old shirts sort of what you might call a memory quilt. Thank Sierra for the good idea and the opportunity to make a fun quilt. This quilt has no batting I just backed it with fleece. To make the T shirt fabric stable I use iron in interfacing on the back of all the squares this made it no big deal to sew with a knit fabric.

Room on the cheep

Some of you may remember the plans I had to make a headboard and recover a garage sale chair that I got almost a year ago. It was for our guest room so the budget had to be small since it was definitely not a necessity.

Plans have changed. When you live in such a large metropolis the craig's list pool of adds are large and diverse. I will reference you to Eric's blog and his sewing machine finds. Anyway the reason I bring this up is often you can not make something as cheep as you can find it used so even though I wanted to make a head board I went to the woodlands online and craig's list (both online classifieds) first to see what I could find.

I found that I could not make a headboard as cheap as I could get one there. I found a nice solid wood carved headboard for $30, I figured it would have cost me about $100 to make the one I was thinking of doing. I thought I can adjust my thinking a little to accommodate a slightly different design. Plus the new direction went better with the current bedding in the room. But it did mean the chair fabric I got was out. Enter a crazy wind floppy man sign ( do you know what I mean I am not sure what they are called) it was advertising a sale on fabric from, to me, an unlikely source. The upholstery shop across from wall-mart. I cant pass up the chance to get some cheep fabric so we went in. and for $20 I found the perfect fabric for the chair.

Now the room break down goes something like this and if you only heard the description of it you might think it sounded pretty sad. Still I love a challenge and the thrill of the hunt for a deal.

Bed dressing's pillow: Shams $3 on clearance, super cheap $4 bed skirt not good quality fabric but it is a bed skirt, no wear and no one will know. Sheet $30 not cheep but they are what matter and will get used. Duvet is an old twin size duvet that actually works okay on the queen bed.

Curtains are a flat sheet on clearance that I cut up with almost no sewing and the rod that was there when we moved in. The fitted sheet I used as the table cloth for the bedside table I got for free at a relief society exchange. I did nothing to the sheet it was gathered all around and it just puddled nicely on the floor. Still thinking of a use for the pillow case.

The Lamp is from goodwill. I spray painted it cream and added a cheap Ikea shade. This brings us to the chair it as I said was from a garage sale it was about $10 plus the $20 I spent in fabric then there is the time and some staples and we are done.

Before

After

Functional to fabulous for what I would have payed just to make an upholstered head board.