Guest Designer Day: Gale's Pillow

----------------- This is a pre-scheduled post.-----------------------

In case you missed my announcement, I am on vacation this week. It is the twins' birthday and Dh and I are celebrating by bringing the family on a Disney cruise.

While I am away, I have pre-scheduled a few posts that will show you how some of the new LD Cut Its sets look like when they are cut out and assembled. I have also asked two of my friends to post a special project each.

In today's special guest designer feature, Gale will show you how she used her Silhouette SD and Make-the-Cut to make a super cute pillow with an LD image. This is one of my favorite projects ever so sit back, and get ready to be wowed. ;-)   
- Jin

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Hello! I'm so honored to be a guest blogger for Jin while she's busy having fun on vacation. My name is Gale and I normally blog at www.stamps-and-stitches.com. My project today is a pillow using a Lettering Delights file, Make-the-Cut software, Silhouette fabric interfacing, and the Silhouette SD.

Houses are really popular in quilting right now so I decided I wanted to make a house pillow. I picked the Funky Town set which includes clipart-on this set it's a little easier to trace than the graphics. I traced the clipart and separated all the pieces. I had to alter a couple of pieces. For example, I didn't want the door shape cut out of the main part of the house so I put a rectangle over the doorway area and welded it to make it solid. I also removed the doorknob from one door panel by taking a rectangle and duplicating the shape of the panel using the warp feature, dragging it over the original panel shape (actually I left it over the shape since I stacked them to duplicate the shape just right), then used boolean join/intersect to remove the doorknob part. Then I put the various parts on separate mats according to how I was going to cut them.

I followed the instructions on the package of Silhouette fabric interfacing to adhere the fabric to the interfacing and the pieces to the mat. The silhouette SD cut the fabric beautifully. I used a blade setting of 5 (3 or 4 may have been enough), pressure of 33 and speed of 6. I set it to cut each shape twice. Here is how my mats looked after cutting and weeding the extra fabric off.

I decided on a simple square pillow with rounded corners so I cut out the pillow panels to match the size of the pillow form I bought and I put a panel of green on the bottom to represent grass. For the applique I like to sew around my shapes so I used the sewable interfacing. If you don't want to sew, use the clean cut interfacing. I like to sew around the underneath layers before adhering the upper layers, so if you do the same, plan for that. Here you can see that I fused the main part of the house and the chimney on and sewed just on the sides of the main part of the house and sides and top of the chimney since the other sides will be covered with other layers of fabric.

For shapes that don't have any hidden parts, I generally start sewing at the bottom left area. It seems to be the least looked-at spot when someone is looking at something like this so if the stitches don't match up perfectly, it's not so noticeable. On this particular design I fused and sewed in this order: main part of house and chimney, door (without panels), bottom strip and roof, window, and last of all the window panes and door panels. I sewed around my shapes with a simple straight stitch using white thread. I love this look and it's super easy to do. As I go, I pull the front threads to the back and tie them off. That way there's no backstitching or loose threads on the front so it looks a lot neater. Here's how it looked with all the layers sewed on:

and from the back-you can see all the places where I tied off the threads:

Before assembling the pillow I sewed a button to the door for the doorknob. Then I sewed the front of the pillow to the back using a 1/2" seam-I did an envelope style back so that I can remove the pillow form and wash the cover. Also, I used an old cd to round the corners. For me it's easier to sew on a curved line than to try to sew 1/2" from a curved line so I drew the lines on with a chalk marker after I sewed the seams. And then I sewed over the marked lines:

After that I trimmed about 1/2" away from the curved corners and zig-zag stitched all around it to prevent fraying.

Put the pillow form in and that's it! A cute house pillow.

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Seriously, is this the best LD/MTC project ever or what?! I *heart* this pillow!! I don't sew but I am so inspired by Gale's work that I just may have to pull the dusty old sewing machine out and try to make this. Thanks so much, Gale, for showing us your pillow! You are amazing! -Jin

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