Star Pillows + Tutorial

Father's day was a good one at the Tolman home. The kids' gave Mitch their homemade father's day cards and I got a book about the "Mayflower ship" on clearance at Border's bookstore. I also made dinner which included a pork roast, scalloped potatoes, veggies and a coconut cream pie for dessert. All in all, I think we treated our favorite Dad like a king yesterday. :)

Today I want to share with you another dollar store project. I actually started this at the same time I made my patriotic vase but I ran out of embroidery floss that I didn't finish the project till last week.

The fun part about this project was that I used some plain tshirts that I got at the dollar store as my base for my pillowcase.

Since I know that I'll be changing this pillowcase every season, I decided to use buttons to make it easy to take out the case off the pillow.

Wanna learn how to make it....here's how I did it.....

First, I gathered my supplies. I purchased two of the dollar shirts (I don't remember what size it was but when I was looking at it at the store, I stretched it a little bit just to have a gauge if it will fit my existing pillowcase or not) I have these pillows that I have put in the close because it didn't match the rest of the colors in my front room and I knew that with this project, I'll be able to bring them back out of obscurity. I also used the fabrics that I got at a thrift store, some fabric fusing paper, a big star template, embroidery floss and my sewing machine.

I used my cricut machine to cut out a star from paper. This will be my template.

I then transferred the image to the fabric fusing paper. Since my star image had a round corner and I wanted my finished star to have a more pointy end, I altered the template and made the changes on the fusible paper.

Then I ironed the star onto my fabric.

Cut out the star from the fabric.

Then I cut out the sleeves and collar of the shirt leaving me with square piece.

Then I laid out the star on the center of the block and added embroidery stitch around the star to adhere it to the shirt.

*with this part, I ran out of embroidery floss for the first star, so I set it aside and decided to use my machine to stitch the other star to its pillowcase. I used pins to keep it from moving.

I used a zigzag stitch on the edges.

After adding the star, I stitched the three sides of the shirt. *I decided to make the bottom edge of the shirt to be the top of my pillowcase. I thought the finished edge made for a nice opening for my pillowcase*

Then I made my marks for where I want the buttons to go. I used two buttons for this one (ran out of big buttons) but I used three on the other pillow which I think, after was said and done, is better than the two.

I handstitched the buttons but made the button holes with the machine.

So that's it! Now I have a couple of nice pillows sitting on my couch in the front room that matches the theme of the season.

What I love most about this project is that I can pretty much do the same technique for all the rest of the seasons. I just need to either go to the dollar store or thrift store to score some cheap tshirts to match my theme. Heck, I can even recycle old shirts in my closet! *wink*

Happy crafting!

Till next time,

Grace