Since the end of The Great British Sewing Bee I’ve stepped away from my sewing machine and for some reason have struggled to think up ideas for creative projects. I think I was just SO inspired by the Sewing Bee that when I no longer had that regular reminder to get sewing nor that weekly prompt for a sewing challenge that I completely forgot to get on with it. So my sewing machine has been neglected and has gathered a thin layer of dust since last month and I keep glancing at it with a guilty look in my eye. I didn’t mean to dump it, it just kind of happened – we drifted apart and I’m just as sad about it as the machine is…
Anyway, the good news is that I’ve finally broken my sewing drought and have made a cushion. It might not be the most challenging of projects but at least I’m sewing again and that can only be a good thing. It only took me about an hour because I was trying to do it in super-fast time before hubby came home from work one evening. I needed to get the cushion completed in secret because it was going to be a gift for hubby’s birthday. Not kind of gift you’d expect a very manly concrete-handling man like my husband would want for his birthday, but he’d spotted a similar cushion online and really took a shine to it for his ‘man cave’ office chair. Ok, maybe it was the fabric that he took a shine to – it IS a pattern that includes pin-up girls, nude, in foliage. Maybe that was it.
So I searched out the exact fabric online – it was Alexander Henry MIRAGE Fabric in navy and I ordered two fat quarters of it – enough to make a pair of cushions. I chose a navy velvet for the back of the cushion and for the piping around the edge. When the fabric arrived I realised that most of the pattern was across the centre of the fat quarter so I decided to make a rectangular cushion rather than square, to get more of the pin-up girls on the cushion! I bought a couple of last season’s cushion designs reduced to £1 in Dunelm that were this rectangular shape and removed the covers so that I just had cushion pads left – this is probably the cheapest way to get cushion fillings; just buy any cushions that are reduced or secondhand from a charity shop or carboot sale then discard (or reuse elsewhere) the covers!
I first inserted a zip along the bottom of both fabric pieces and zipped it together before making a thin line of piping by wrapping a strip of the velvet around the cord. I layered the piping in-between the pin-up fabric front and the velvet back with the right sides facing and straight stitched all the way round the cushion. At this point, I realised that I’d completely zipped up the zip so I couldn’t turn the cushion the right side out! Luckily I could feel whether the zipper head was and eased it back a little while it was still inside the cushion and managed to make enough of a gap to reach in and unzip it completely – phew!
I popped the new pin-up girl cushion cover onto the cushion pad and done! One gift (that hubby loved) all sewn up!
