Fighting the Frumps

Remember yesterday morning's dilemma? Well, I did end up making myself a pillow...



Cut 17" muslin circle, marked a spiral in with 1" spacing, and cut 1 yard of plaid into 2 1/2" strips.

Sewed all strips together and used my rolled hem presser foot (this is another new discovery) to hem one side of the plaid strips.

Used my ruffler (imagine me saying this with pretty-close-to-jazz-hands) to sew the strips onto the spiral marked on the muslin.  This was not an easy task... Now - take a moment to really look at this ruffler foot. It's a little intimidating. It has moving parts. You can choose whether to gather every stitch, every 6, or every 12. You can also choose how full you want the gathers to be. For this project I gathered every stitch with a medium fullness.

I topstitched the plaid about 1/8" away from the seam so that I could control the direction of the ruffles. I forgot to take a picture of that part.

I cut two half+ circles (the "+" being ~1inch that I hemmed on each straight edge) and stacked the straight edges. Sewed the stacked half circles to the ruffled front, and created an envelope for a 16" round pillow form.

Here is the finished product! Can you stand it?! I think it turned out SO ADORABLE!!!

Couple of things I would do differently to avoid the white spots:

1. 
   
   Cut to-be-ruffled fabric into 3 1/2" strips.
2. 
   
   Use a base fabric that coordinates or matches the ruffled fabric.
3. 
   
   Use a spiral that's a little bit closer together than 1".
4. 
   
   First row of spiral would be on the edge of the base fabric. I started 1" in.

Not too bad for a Saturday morning, huh?