Eggcellent Series #4 - Bunnies At Church

I can not believe there is only more day left in my pillow series. This week has flown by! I hope that you have been inspired to try a pillow, maybe even one of the tutorials I created. It has been fun and completely fulfilled my crazy desire to create a bunch of Easter pillows.

Today, I present "Bunnies at Church".. isn't it sweet? This is a vintage pattern from Needlecrafter - you can download it by clicking here. There are a ton of awesome vintage patterns to play with.

Materials Needed: 
Fat quarter of white fabric
(2) fat quarters of spring pattern fabric
13" square of fusible batting
Polyfill stuffing
Crayola crayons
hand needle & thread

Step One: Print out the embroidery pattern from the site listed above.
 
Step Two: Grab your erasable pen and trace the pattern on to the white fabric.

 Step Three: Using your white crayon, color in wherever you plan on tinting with crayons.

 Here is my completed piece; this provides as a surface treatment for your tinting.

 Step Four: Color in and have fun! Now colors may slightly change after you free motion and heat set it. If you compare this to my final pillow, you can see that the colors become more subdued.

 Step Five: Now it's time to free motion! Free motion drawing has a very distinctive look, especially when you are doing it with your conventional sewing machine. I love it, I'm crazy about it..but not everyone is. If it is not your cup of tea, feel free to complete this embroidery by hand. If you like it like me, here are some tips:
* lower your feed dogs, if you can't do it manually on your sewing machine then you can tape a business card over them while you work.
*check to see if your machine has special settings for free motion - mine did and I didn't know for about 6 months..doh!
*some lower the stitch to 0, but I don't
* try to be consistent with your speed on the pedal and moving the fabric.

 Step Six: Now it's time to heat set the crayon and remove the pen marks. Place a sheet of copy paper on top of the embroidery and heat set with a very hot iron. You will know you are done when the crayon has left some color on the paper.

 Step Seven: To complete the cover you will need to cut the following pieces and sew as seen below.
Fabric A - (2) 2"x10"
Fabric B - (2) 2"x13"

 Step Eight: This pillow is just decorative and the cover will not be removable. I didn't use a pillow form and simply stuffed it with polyfill. For this reason I wanted to give the cover more stability. I cut a 13" piece of fusible batting and ironed on to the wrong side of the cover.

Step Nine: Cut a 13" square of one of the spring pattern fabrics. Pin the front and back covers right side together. Sew the around the border with a 1/4" seam allowance and leave a 3" open space on the bottom of the pillow. Clip the corners up to the stitching line and pull right side out.

 Step Ten: Gently fill the pillow with polyfill stuffing to your desired puffiness. With a needle and hand quilting thread, sew up the 3" hole with a ladder stitch.

And there she is! I love that you can enjoy hand embroidery patterns in a fraction of the time. I love free motion sketching and use it lot with raw edge applique as well.

Come on back tomorrow for my final pillow tutorial in the series.. crochet on fabric..mmmm, my favorite!