Sew what

First, let me preface this post by saying that, while my purpose is not to brag, I am extremely proud of myself!  See... two Christmases ago, my mom gave me a sewing machine.  

The machine sat in the unopened box until we moved, then came out of the box just to sit some more on our office counter.  This lasted for almost a year.  This week though, I finally watched the accompanying DVD and learned how to thread the bobbin and the machine (holy bajoly sewing machines have small parts!), and then proceeded to make my first project... drumroll, please... PILLOWS!  

For our living room chairs (that came from my grandparents' house... they had them since before my mom was born!), I had originally bought the pillows seen in this photo from Christmas:

Post-holiday decor, however, the red in the pillows just didn't flow with the rest of the room.  So they were returned, and I picked out this fabric (Braemore Emilio in Lemon Drop) for new pillows.  Mom got a yard of it for us from Williams & Sherrill (love) when she was in Midlo one day, and the lovely fabric sat folded (in the shape of a pillow) on one of the chairs for months.  Shame.  But... not anymore!  

After 5 hours of cutting, sewing, and cussing, one pillow is DONE!  Yes, just one.  My math skills are clearly a bit rusty during the summer, and in purchasing the cording I apparently only added up enough yardage for one of the pillows, not two.  So, as soon as I go back to the fabric store & get more, the second pillow will be made (and the good news is I am 99.9% sure it will not take nearly as long as the first!) 

  
While a pillow was a great choice for my first attempt at sewing, it was for sure not a brilliant idea to include PIPING (cording/piping/whatever you want to call it) on my very first project.  Way to make things difficult!  

I'm glad I didn't take the easy way out though, because I love, love, love how it looks with the piping.  And it could've been worse... I could have tried to include a zipper!  I'm not that out of my mind though, and since I didn't want to do an envelope back (I figured having both sides finished was a safer choice in case I messed one up!), I just stuffed in the pillow form and stitched it up by hand.  I can always just snip the hand stitches if I need to wash the cover.  

Another thing I was excited about was that we didn't have to spend any money on the forms!  Shortly after getting married, we bought two striped rectangular pillows from Target that we didn't end up having a place for when we bought our house (here are the pillows in our apartment).

As luck would have it, their covers were removable and there were nice down inserts inside!  So not only did we get (basically) free pillow forms, we also made room in our closet where the unused striped pillows were living.  Now... off to the fabric store so we can actually have two pillows instead of just one...