Designing A Pillow Cover

After wandering around in circles for a couple of days, I've found a direction. When we decided to open the showroom, I went on a pillow design frenzy and made 20 pillows. The fabric store down the road cuts up their sample books and sells them out of a grocery cart. The pieces are small, none larger than 15 x 15". There's usually enough of a single design to collage into 2, maybe three pillows. They're all gorgeous, one-of-a-kind and I'd buy one in a heart beat. One of these days I'll put them on Etsy.

Since I have 18 forms left, I've decided that my first design project is going to be an 18 x 18" a pillow cover. We do personalized, so that's why I was messing around with fonts. 

I found this fun tree design on iStock photo. iStock is a great place to purchase inexpensive illustrations that translate well into fabric block print designs. This one will cost me $15. I added the detailed leaves, figuring I could heat carve the detail just to add a little interest.

Since the design was so large, I printed it on a couple of sheets. Gluing the design to the craft foam paper back has turned out to be brilliant and solves my image transfer dilemma perfectly. There's quite a bit of detail here. I applied the glue more thoroughly and carefully on the second half and got better results. Giving it a couple of minutes to dry made cutting easier.

Half way through cutting the tree top, I found that my blade was crapping out. Don't be lazy and cheap like me and wait until your blade acts up. Replace your blade regularly. By the time it's dragging, it's already tearing the foam, leaving behind a lousy edge which means you'll have to carve that piece again, Sheree.

New blade? Seriously huge improvement. On the first half, I carved around each little branch and leaf. On the second half, I made a clean cut, chopping off the entire branch, cutting out the small sections separately. The long cuts were much cleaner than the smaller, stop and go cuts.

When I was through, I reassembled the whole thing on an 18 x 18"  paper pattern. I'm heading out to the fabric store now to see what I can find. Tomorrow, I'm going to print a pillow top.