Cushion Crafting Weekend

One of the original planed crafts when I bought freezer paper to make stencils was to make cushion covers that would match the new wallpaper Gemma's living room.  We planned to have a fun filled crafting weekend and little did we know how long it would actually take to make  four fairly simple cushion covers.  Before I start I will apologise for the bad quality photos, my camera is still up the creek (and I may have forgotten to turn the ISO down so they are all stupidly bright doh!! be warned highly photo-shopped pictures ahead!!).

The photo above is the design of the wallpaper she has on one wall, so we started by tracing the green and dotted swirls onto the freezer paper.  Gemma cut out the green swirls with ease and set about using a hole punch to create the dotted design.  This took so long and also had the added difficulty of stamping two holes in the paper as I had to fold it over to make the curve.

After what seemed like hours of punching the designs were ready to paint.  We laid out the fabric and started by marking out the squares as we were only going to paint one side of the cushion.  For some reason neither of us could measure accurately (and before you ask no, neither of us had been drinking!) In the end Nathan suggested cutting out a piece of cardboard the correct side and tracing around it, this was a lot easier!!  By this time it was already late afternoon, but we battled on and started painting on the gold dots.  

To speed up the process we used a hairdryer to dry the paint quicker, although after an hour and a half of painting we were getting tired of this too.

Instead of following the wallpaper pattern we made it random and were thrilled with the results.  The gold was extra sparkly so really shows up against the brown fabric.

We took a break from crafting to let the fabric paint dry thoroughly and headed over to our friend Sarah Jane's for the Eurovision Song Contest.  As always it was a bit ridiculous, it all seems like a bit of a joke to me I can never take it seriously.  Blue, the UK entry didn't score at the bottom, but being beaten by Jedward is a bit humiliating.

We were keen to get back to painting and so when back at Gemma's we decided to start on the turquoise swirls over the top of the spots.

There was only one moment of panic when we had painted the first swirl on and thought "have we made a massive mistake?" but the final result was awesome and we went to bed very happy.

Sunday morning we cut up the squares and iron them on a very hot heat to seal the paint.

The last step was to sew the squares together.  We were going to wait until we could get hold of a sewing machine to do this but we were on such a role we decided to do it all by hand.  We added an invisible zip along one edge and then tacked and sewed the rest insuring the pillow did fit inside.  We had cut the pillows 2cm larger all the way around just in case so had plenty of fabric to play with.

After trimming off the excess and turning it inside out the result amazed us. I think you will agree that the pillows match the wall very well and definitely add a bit more colour to the room.  For a first attempt at making pillows since secondary school I think we did a fantastic job.