Zig Zag Pillow Cover
- At September 18, 2013
- By Kelly
- In Sewing For The Home
- 2
There was some zigzag fabric leftover from the crib skirt, so I made this pillow cover.
This is a simple cover with a pillow sham style opening in the back. I like this tutorial for perfect pillows. This cover is on an 18″ pillow form, so that is the size I cut my pattern. If you check out that tutorial, you’ll see it instructs you to add a seam allowance. I don’t. If you skip the seam allowance, you’ll still be able to jam your pillow form in, and it will be nice and plump.
Here’s the front piece.
Notice that the corners aren’t squares. That’s what makes it work!
I wasn’t sure how much overlap there should be in the back. To make matters worse, I didn’t have much fabric left and I was trying to match up these stinking zigzags. I googled. Some sites said 6″. I did not have 6″. I asked the Sewing Mamas community. No one answered within the first 5 seconds of my posting, so I went off to go it alone. (Yes, I really was that impatient.) The best I could do was about 4 inches, sliding the bigger piece around trying to get the best alignment of zigs and zags.
These zigzags were really making me crazy. (Crazier?) To line them up, I could have about an inch and a half overlap, which was not likely to be enough, the 4-ish that I went with, or almost 7″, which I didn’t have enough fabric for, and might have been too much to be able to get the pillow in and out of the cover.
Once I settled on the 4″ overlap, I hemmed the piece that was going to be on top and just ran the edge of bottom piece through the serger. Then I pinned the two pieces together so they wouldn’t get shifty on me when I was trying to attach the front.
Shortly after all that pinning, it occurred to me that this was a very bad decision. Do you see why?
If I had left the pins in there and then sewed the front and back right sides together, it would have been rather challenging to remove the pins to turn the cover right side out. All the pin heads would have been inside the cover!
Once I had the overlap figured out, I got this brilliant idea that I didn’t have to actually trim the corners for the back like I had the front piece. I could just pin it all together and then run the serger over it, cutting off the extra when I run over the purple line.
Ooops! That doesn’t work because when you reach the corner, you will have a bunch of extra fabric that is not near the serger’s knife. You’ll have to pull the piece completely off the machine, cut the extra fabric and then try again. It did seem like a good idea at the time. If you are sewing on the sewing machine instead of the serger, you can leave the back pieces bigger and then trim them after they are seamed.
Looks lovely before you put a pillow in it…
And then, once the pillow is in, you realize – it didn’t matter that the zig zags were lined up because the middle of the pillow is going to be fatter and pull the cover apart more than it will on the sides. Well, isn’t that annoying! All that carefully aligning, all the pinning, and for what? Probably a lesson in there somewhere…
Because really, it looks fine. And you’re not supposed to be inspecting the pillow, you’re supposed to be using it to make a cozy spot. It doesn’t really go with my chair, but it’s going to my sister’s, so it should look fine there in my nephew’s room with its matching curtains and crib skirt.
Happy Sewing!
Kelly