Easy pillow covers

I found some great fabric I wanted to use in the nursery so I decided to make a couple of pillows for our glider. My friend Kate taught me how to do this, and it's super easy--no zippers involved! (Though I do plan to learn how to sew a zipper...eventually.)

Here's what one of the finished pillows looks like:

Gather these materials:

• fabric
• pillow
• pins
• iron
• scissors/rotary cutter

I was making two pillows, both sized 14x14. You need three pieces of fabric for this type of pillowcase--one for the front and two that overlap on the back. I planned to sew with a 1/2 inch seam allowance so I cut my front piece to be 15x15. The size of the back pieces depends on how fluffy your pillow is. I've made these before where my pieces just barely met in the back, so now I cut them larger than I initially think I'll need. I cut two 15x10 pieces, and those worked out perfectly. I had one pillow that was fluffier than the other, and both turned out great.

You should probably iron your fabric before you start, but since my ironing board is finicky--sometimes it just collapses in on itself--I iron on a towel on the table. Because of this and being so pregnant, I'd rather iron less fabric, so I did my cutting first, then ironed the pieces before sewing.

Next, you'll want to turn under one edge of each back piece, pin it in place and sew it. This will give you finished edges where you put the pillow in. Do this with one of the longer edges, for me a 15-inch edge.

I sew these pieces as close to the edge as I can.

After you have one finished edge for each back piece, you'll put the three pieces together and pin them all the way around. You want right sides together for this (see progression):

top piece, right side up

 one back piece, right side down

add the second back piece, right side down, overlapping the first back piece

Pin and sew all the way around--again, I did a 1/2-inch seam allowance. Trim the corners for a neater "inside-out flip."

Finally, flip the fabric inside out and stuff your pillow in!

 See the gap?

I made one polka-dotted pillow and another using brown houndstooth. Because we're Alabama fans (think houndstooth and elephants), I wanted to add elephants to the houndstooth fabric. Though Bama colors are crimson and white, our nursery is green, brown and teal. Here's what I came up with:

 I cut a rectangle of this green elephant fabric...

 then turned the edges under and ironed them down...

 then pinned the elephants onto the top piece of houndstooth fabric...

 then sewed the elephants on!

(You would do this before putting all three pieces together, btw.)

Finished pillows!

Project Update:

Remember the shutter I cleaned up for our travel wall project? I finally got all the letters I needed from Michael's, stained them with leftover floor stain from last year, finished the shutter and Andrew hung the beginnings of our wall on Sunday:

Sprucing things up a bit

Other than the baby projects I’d like to get done, I’ve started two projects recently that will add to our kitchen and living room. They aren’t quite done yet, but I’ll share what I’ve done to this point.

The Wall O’ Travel

Andrew said something to me recently about hanging more of our travel pictures, specifically from our trip to Bolivia last May. He brings up moving there about once a week now, and he just wrote one of his grad school papers on the groundwater situation where we worked. Who knows if that’s where God will call us, but we’re both more than okay if Bolivia is a stop!

In order to display some of those pictures, I first had to think about where they could go in our home. We don’t have a ton of wall space, which is sad to me since I love love love hanging pictures and have a TON. In fact, we were going to hang several of the paintings we’ve collected from overseas trips in our guest room, but that got nixed when we found out we were pregnant.

We have two really large windows in our living room, and there happens to be a nice space between one of those and our kitchen. I decided that would be the travel wall space, but I wanted to do something fun to it besides just hanging framed pictures and art.

Then I remembered a shutter I bought at an estate sale last summer. It cost a $1, but it may have been thrown in for free with the other things I bought. I was picking up some cool bottles for my friend Amanda’s wedding when I stumbled upon the old shutter. I figured I’d find something to do with it one day!

My plan is to glue letters spelling “travel” on the shutter and hang it horizontally at the top of the wall space. Then we’ll hang our framed pics in a collage underneath it. I originally wanted small wooden letters, but I ended up having to go with what Michael’s had--they're slightly larger than I wanted and cursive lowercase. So far I have the “t,” “r” and “v.” I’ll check back once a week until I have them all, then stain them in a driftwood stain we have in the basement.

Windowpanes in the kitchen

In addition to shutters, I also really love windowpanes. I have a huge one I got in college that we’ve never found a space for in the house. Maybe one day. For now, I have the one my friends turned into a chalkboard/bulletin board in our office. When they found that one, it had a friend that they left for me in our mudroom. I’m turning it into a chalkboard for our kitchen so I can use it for menu plans and/or grocery items.

So far I’ve cleaned it up and painted two of the three panes. One of the panes has a crack in it, and rather than have Andrew fix it for me (he did that for my big one in college) I think I’ll try to tape it up and glue cork to that pane to hang notes.

My soapy water to clean the shutter and window

Stay tuned for the finished products!

Crafty Christmas #2 (The final saga)

Yeah, yeah, it's a bit late for me to still be recapping the events of Christmas. Sue me. (Really, don't. Though we don't have much to be taken from us...a half-renovated home and two vehicles with 130,000 and 230,000 miles. Pretty disappointing, I'd say!) Anyway, here are a few details of some of the other gifts I made for Christmas.

Ceramic tile coasters
I was mainly waiting to post about these because I didn't get to see my bff while I was in Alabama for Christmas, and I made Katie a set of coasters that she didn't get until sometime later in January. I didn't want her to read about her gift before seeing it!!

Using this Tutorial, I made four sets of four coasters. All you need are tiles, scrapbook paper (or napkins, cards, etc), mod podge and a clear acrylic spray that is waterproof. I went to Home Depot and bought 16 ceramic tiles for a whopping $0.16 each! I had mod podge, bought the spray and also gathered some new scrapbook paper that I felt would match the living rooms of three of my friends. I've never seen Katie's current living room, but since she loves purple, I figured going with a purple/lilac theme was a safe bet.

All you do is mod podge the tile, put the paper down, mod podge on top (several coats) then do several coats of the acrylic spray. Again, check out the tutorial, but this was super easy. I've since made more and I actually like cutting the paper to have a border. The tiles are 4.25 inches square, so I found cutting my paper to an easy four inches around allows me to get the cleanest, neatest look.

Tea wreath

In the first Christmas post, I showed pictures of the enormous rag quilt I made for my friend Sarah. Because that was supposed to be her gift for Christmas 2010, I also made her a tea wreath. Sarah lives with three other women, and they are near the women's college so they have a ton of girls at their house all the time. They drink lots of tea, so I thought this was a cute idea to display your tea offerings. This was the Tutorial I used. I cut out a big circle of cardboard to start:

The tutorial says you can glue scrapbook paper to the wreath for this project, but I made a mess with that. Plus, my 12x12 paper wasn't large enough. I half-panicked and looked through my fabric scraps. I found one that would work and plugged in my hot glue gun. The fabric worked so much better and was much easier to glue and stretch around the cardboard. 

I then glued scrapbook paper to the clothespins and glued the clothespins to the wreath. I added some tea and voila!

Oh yeah, I also added the twine to hang it. I glued it in place between two clothespins so it wouldn't move.

Book letters
For two of my friends I decided to cover wooden letters with book pages. One of these women just finished her master's degree in secondary education and wants to teach English, so I figured it would be the perfect thing to hang in her classroom. Here's the Tutorial for those of you who want to give it a shot.

I needed scissors, an old book, a glue gun and a letter, which I bought at Michael's using a coupon.

Rip out book pages and cut them in strips that are close to the width of the part of the letter you are working on. Roll the strip, gluing at the end, then glue the roll to the letter. I hope Buffy and Ashley didn't read too closely...I used pages from a book Andrew and I had to read for premarital counseling. We didn't love it and decided to recycle it into Christmas presents :)

Book art!

Moisturizing hand scrub
For my step-sister-in-law I made this lemony moisturizing hand scrub: Tutorial.

I had olive oil, sugar and Kosher salt, bought lemon extract really cheap at Wal-Mart and grabbed some lemons at the grocery store. Follow the tutorial for amounts, but I decided in the end using a little less olive oil and more lemon extract worked best. If you cook a lot, this helps rid your hands of smells from chopping garlic and onions and keeps them soft and smelling nice! You can keep it in a jar under the sink or in the fridge if you might not use it often. My friend Kristin made some for friends and herself and found it goes pretty quickly though!

I also made an ice cream sundae basket for some friends and sewed an apron for my mother-in-law. You can find the basket on my Pinterest, but basically, package up goodies that can be used to make ice cream sundaes!! Cones, candies and I made a chocolate sauce, too. Just don't include the ice cream...unless you are running by the store on your way to gift your present!