Wordy Envelope cushion

A friend of mine recently moved from a gorgeous but tiny one up one down cottage into a much larger house with a spare room for me to stay in. Hooray! What to bring as a small house warming gift that suits both my friend and her chappy? Much inward debate led to today's burst of creativity in the shape of a wordy cushion.

Much as I like the Jan Constantine cushions when I see them in shops they are way out of my budget, a tad too cutesy for my taste and dry clean only. They are also not right at all for my friends. Fresh from making embroidered felt birdies I had an idea for a word cushion. I know that there are hundreds of cushions in the shops with inspirational words emblazoned on the front. 'Love, Hope, Believe'. Sorry but they are just not for me, all a bit too saccharine.

My friend is Welsh and does speak the language. One of my favorite memories with her is when we were manning my stand at a disastrous Christmas Fair. The fair was truly appalling, nobody was buying anything, and we were stuck there for three days. There was nothing for it but to start my Welsh language education with all the rude words. This led to inevitable hilarity much to the bewilderment of the other stand holders as we sat there cackling away.

All in all it seemed appropriate to go down the Welsh route. No not with Cwtch (cuddle), although it is a brilliant word. No not with the rude words! With 'Proper Tidy' in red (washable felt) letters on a grey fabric. Amusing for my friend and suitable manly for her chappy. OK I know a cushion is hardly manly but as cushions go it is pretty butch.

Equipment

Fabric

Felt 

Paper

Pins

Fabric scissors

Thread

Sewing machine
Computer with word or publisher
Printer

Method - Time taken: About three hours.

1. Have a play with fonts in word or publisher (Publisher is easier as you can make  a document the size of the cushion and have much more flexibility to play with sizes and placing.) When you have a font you like the look of make the letters big enough to look good on the cushion.

Top Tip: When choosing a font make sure that you don't have one that has really thin lines in the letters you are using. It will make life really tricky when you come to cut them out and harder still to sew them on. I used Bookman Old Style.

2. Print out your letters and cut them out. I found it easier to not cut out the inside holes as it makes it easier to be neat when cutting the felt out.  Pin the letters to the felt and cut them out.

3. Cut out three pieces of fabric the size and shape of your cushion plus an extra 3/4 inch all round for sewing. Put two of them aside for later.

4. Pin the letters to the front piece of fabric. I went for deliberately wonky as it looked better and to make this kind of thing  perfectly straight is a nightmare. Once you are happy with how they look sew the letters on. It is faster by machine but it would also look really pretty sewing them on with embroidery thread.

5. Looking good so far. Just need to make the cushion up. Take one of the two back pieces of fabric and fold over one of the long sides by about 5 cm, iron and do it again to create a large hem.

 6. Place onto the front of the cushion with the fold facing you and the raw edges lined up with the top and the sides of the front piece.

Terrible picture. Sorry. I'd take another but I can't un-pick the whole thing now.

7. Treat the final piece of fabric in the same way but make the fold 10cm and place on top of the other back piece with the fold facing you and the raw edges lined up with the bottom of the front piece.

8. Pin all three pieces of fabric together and sew around the outside of the cushion. Dead easy.

9. Snip the corners of the cushion to help them  make a nice point and turn the whole lot the right way round.

10. Ta dah! One 'Proper Tidy' cushion cover. I like to iron the edges to make them really sharp but that is me being a bit fussy. Put a pad inside and job done.

  
Top Tip: Using a pad that is slightly too large for the cushion cover will give you a gorgeously plump cushion that won't need to be shaken too often to get it back in shape.

I am going to admit to being more than a bit pleased with how this turned out. If I'm brutally honest I didn't want to give it away and ended up wrapping it up very quickly in order to take the temptation away.

Felt birdy decorations

One of my friends has just had a lovely baby boy. Having never made anything for a newborn before I thought it was time for a challenge.

Problem 1: It has to be safe. I clearly do not want to be responsible for anything nasty.
Problem 2: It has to be wipe clean or washable.


I settled on a playmat/ blanket as something that would be handy, potentially save the carpet from baby glurp/food/poo, but also colourful and fun as well.

I started with a patchwork of grey fabric from an old skirt and some blue and white striped fabric from those wedding cushions. As you can see the patchwork skills have improved somewhat. I've actually read the book I was given...I'm not ready to talk about how to patchwork successfully yet because I don't feel successful yet! I do have an idea brewing though.....

The whole thing was tasteful but somewhat drab. Decoration time! I wanted to do cheerful birds but wasn't quite sure how. Embroidering them would take ages and be totally impractical against the aforementioned baby glurp/food/poo. Felt would be perfect and look great but isn't machine washable. Making birds from fabric scraps would drive me mad trying to get a neat edge on all of them.

I did a google looking for inspiration and stumbled across this Folksy shop. The Felted Rainbow:

WASHABLE FELT!

I had no idea it existed. Problem solved. A few clicks later and a small bundle of brightly coloured felt was on its way.

In the meantime I had to come up with some bird shapes. Drawing  is not my number one skill. However with a bit of faffing with some google images, tracing and making it up as I went along I came up with a few shapes that I thought would pass. I was hardly going for realistic birds anyway. (Feel free to use them!)

Top Tip: Scanning them meant that I could play about with sizes to fit the squares.

Having cut out the templates it's time to pin them to the felt and start cutting.

Top Tip: It is very tempting to cut more than one layer of fabric at a time to save time. I find it rarely saves time as one of the layers invariably ends up a bit skew-whiff however well I've pinned it. Instead I do this boring bit in front of a good programme on TV.(Blackadder - now free on Netflix. Hooray!)

Felt shapes cut, laying them out is the fun part. A bit of tweaking later.....by this I actually mean a half hour absurdly serious discussion with my Matey over dinner....and I was ready to pin the birds to the blanket.

Machine stitching the felt to the blanket as closely to the edge of the felt as possible is easy but time consuming. You don't want to go too fast as the fabric will need constant moving to fit the shape of the felt. This is where my ancient hand turn machine is amazing as I can do one stitch at a time if needed.  At the end of the seam go over the start of the stitching for about a centimetre to secure it really safely from investigating little fingers and snip the ends of the threads:

At this stage the birds look more like ghosts and tadpoles. Wings are what they need. Smaller versions of the same shapes as the birds pinned and sewed on in exactly the same way. I decided to go slightly clashing colours as I felt that the grey and blue background would balance them out nicely and the whole effect wouldn't be too gaudy.

 
Just a bit of detail lacking. Using some embroidery thread I stitched on some beaks, legs and eyes.
Nothing fancy, just a basic in and out stitch and randomly placed appendages. I wanted it to have a simple look and for each bird to have a different personality.

The eyes are three stitches one way and three stitches the other way back over the first three. This makes for a mini pad of thread so the eye sticks out a bit.

The beak is even easier. Three stitches for the top and three for the bottom and all tied off very, very securely at the back. I put at least four knots and a few stitches just in case.

You can draw the features on in advance with tailors chalk but I like to place them randomly.

The legs are now a doddle. Four stitches down and three to the left and another three just above to make feet:

So there we go. Dead easy washable felt embroidered birdies, perfect for cheering up just about anything.