Happy Monday! While browsing around on my new favorite place, Pintrest, I found this painting and fell in love.
Isn’t that lovely? I want to be there, greeting the day. Well, I don’t really paint, but you know I love fabric and a challenge. So I decided to create a pillow for my couch – a nice reminder that summer is coming. This is what I came up with:
Can you see the sky, water, and sand? I didn’t want it to be super literal – you know like “oh she has a pillow of the beach on her couch…..” But I am pretty happy with how it came out. This design would be pretty in any color combination – I thought about an all blue one – starting with a dark blue and fading into a light. If you’d like to make one – here’s a loose tutorial on what I did.
Step 1: The basis for the pillow is pleats. The top, gold portion is all one piece, just folded up to make pleats. Then I slid in one little strip of blue to mimic some clouds.
I continued cutting strips (about 21″ long) and pressing them into pleats….various shades of blue for the water and tan/brown for the sand. My first layout looked like this:
I changed it a little bit.
Step 2: Once I had all of the strips cut out, I cut out the front and back pillow pieces – about 21″ x 18″. I just used a nice cream. Then I started at the top of the pillow and sewed the pleats onto the pillow front.
I also inserted those little “waves”. Just a small strip of pleats running the opposite way.
Once all of the pleats were topstitched on, I sewed the back piece on with right sides together.
Be sure to leave an opening in the bottom so you can turn/stuff it.
Step 3: The waves. I started to hand stitch the waves on…then got frustrated and pulled out the hot glue gun. I just glued those sheer pieces on where I wanted them – you can’t see the glue and it was super easy. Lastly I hand-whipped the opening closed, and tossed it on my couch:
It looks a little lonely right now – it needs some more summer/spring pillows to share it’s home. But it makes me really happy to sit beside it and dream of the ocean. Have a great day!
xoxo
jessica
