When I mentioned in my last post that I would be making some throw pillows this month, several people commented that they were looking forward to seeing how I do it. There are plenty of great tutorials on the internet from professional drapery workrooms with tips and tricks for creating beautiful pillows, and I'm not sure the world really needs one more. This is not going to be a full-on tutorial, more of a Reminders-for-Future-Rebecca post because I haven't sewn throw pillows in probably 12 years and I had to refer back to OLD bog posts to remember how to shift my brain from Quilt Sewing Mode back to Drapery Workroom Mode.
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| 13 x 22 Pillows with Invisible Zippers and Decorative Rope Cord Trim |
As with most sewing projects, it will take longer to explain how to do this in words and pictures than it does to make the pillows from start to finish. Especially if you are a quilter used to spending months or years on a project, this will feel like a really quick and satisfying sew. Let's get started!
Supplies:
- Mid to Heavy Weight Home Home Dec or Upholstery Fabric, sufficient to cut two pieces (front and back) for each pillow with 1/2" seam allowances. If your fabric has a repeating pattern like mine, you will need more fabric for pattern matching
- Decorative rope cord trim with lip, enough for the perimeter of your pillow plus minimum of 5" for joining the ends
- Pillow Insert sized 1-2" larger than your desired finished pillow size
- All purpose polyester lightweight serger thread, preferably color matched to your fabric (if using a serger -- you can zigzag or overcast the edges on your sewing machine, too)
- All purpose polyester sewing thread, regular 50 weight for your sewing machine
- Size 90/16 Jeans needle for your sewing machine
- Invisible zipper color matched as closely as possible to your fabric, LONGER than the bottom edge of your pillow
- Sewing Machine
- Serger is optional, if you have one I recommend using it
Step One: Cutting
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| Hearth Room Sofa Pillows, Ready to Make a Start |
I've made my own pattern for this pillow on heavyweight paper, measuring the 13" x 22" desired rectangular pillow size plus 1" in both directions (for 1/2" seam allowances) and I've tapered the corners using a cardstock template that I've had for ages, because I want my pillows to have a square appearance when they are finished and stuffed -- I don't like those pointy acute angle corners you get from pillows that are cut with perfect right angle corners. Google "pillow corner template dog ears" and you can probably find tutorials for drafting these adjusted corners on your own or reusable acrylic corner templates. My fabric is an upholstery weight chenille from Kravet, with a narrow decorative rope cord from Samuel & Sons (both are To the Trade) and #4 invisible zipper by the yard from The Zipper Lady. Important note, the invisible zippers that (used to be!) readily available at stores like JoAnn Fabrics are typically #2, suitable for lightweight dress and skirt fabrics. The #4 size I order from The Zipper Lady is worth seeking out because no one wants to go to all the work of putting an invisible zipper into a pillow next to rope cord only to have the zipper bust apart as soon as you stuff the pillow, or within weeks of the finished pillow being used.
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| Paper Pattern Centered on Fabric Pattern, Secured with Pattern Weights |
Okay, this next step is crucial if your fabric is patterned. I marked the pillow pattern at center top, center bottom, and the center of both sides, and then I carefully positioned the paper pattern on my fabric such that the strong graphic woven design will be centered nicely on my finished pillow. My chenille fabric had to be carefully straightened on my worktable first because, unlike a cotton or canvas woven, the weave has a lot of give and distorts easily. Those yellow donuts I'm using are pattern weights, probably purchased from wholesale workroom supplier Rowley Company in the early 2000s. I cut out the first pillow front with my biggest tailor's shears.
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| No More Paper Pattern After the First Cut! |
In the photo above, I've taken that first pillow front that I cut using my paper pattern and laid it over my fabric, carefully matching the fabric pattern along all four cut edges. With a fabric pattern like this, I only use the paper pattern to cut out the first pillow front and all other pillow fronts and backs cut from that fabric will be cut using the first fabric cut as a pattern.
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| Pattern Match Secured By Pattern Weights, Ready to Cut |
I am making two of these pillows to sit side by side on a sofa and not only do I want my fabric pattern to be centered exactly the same on both pillows, but I also want the pattern to match along all of the seam lines on each pillow.
Step Two: Overcast Raw Edges
Having cut out four identical pillow pieces, two fronts and two backs, I took them to my serger to finish the raw edges with a wide 3-thread overlock. This was standard procedure for all custom throw pillows made by my professional drapery workroom, but it was particularly important with my chenille fabric that frays horribly with minimal handling.
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| 3-Thread Wide Overlock Will Resolve Fabric Fraying |
I'm using a size 90 needle in my Babylock Triumph serger, wide 3-thread balanced overlock (left needle) and ordinary beige Maxilock serger thread just like you'd use in garment sewing.
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| Oh Fabric, Behave! |
In overcasting the edges I only want my serger knife to trim away stray threads along the cut edge of my pillow pieces, not trim away any actual fabric, otherwise the pillow fronts and backs might not match up just right anymore and the pillows might end up misshapen or too small. The fuzz and strings you see in my serger's trim bin below are all that was cut off from serging around an entire pillow front:
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| Only Trim Stray Threads, Not Fabric |
On my Babylock Triumph serger, if I position fabric feeding under the presser foot so that I can just barely see a sliver of the metal stitch plate in front of the presser foot, I know that my fabric edge will be right next to the knife (not under it!) as it approaches my needle, ensuring that my stitches tightly wrap the fabric edge with no loops hanging off the edge and no fabric accidentally trimmed away.
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| If I Can See a Sliver of the Stitch Plate, I Know I'm Good |
One other crucial thing to mention -- it's important that your serger stitch is balanced and you're neither stretching and waving the edges of your fabric nor inadvertently puckering/gathering the fabric edges as you're overcasting them. I didn't need to make any adjustments to my serger to get a nice, flat stitch on this project, but I tested on scraps of my chenille project fabric before I began serging my actual pillow pieces, serging across the lengthwise and crosswise fabric grains and around a simulated corner, and I would have adjusted my differential feed if I had to in order to eliminate any distortion I was seeing on my test scraps.
Step Three: Sew Decorative Rope Cord to Pillow Fronts
We're moving to my regular sewing machine now, my Bernina B990 that I've set up with a size 90/16 Jeans needle and a beige all-purpose polyester sewing thread.
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| Sewing Rope Cord Trim to Pillow Fronts |
When I am working with a really thick or difficult trim, I've been known to hand baste it to my pillow front before machine stitching, but that wasn't necessary with this particular trim. See that coral twill tape "lip" attached to the rope cord? I find it extremely annoying that the manufacturer couldn't have used a tape that was color matched to the rope cord, because we will need to stitch extremely close to the rope cord to ensure that none of that coral tape shows along the seams in the finished pillows! Second thing to note -- always measure the width of that "lip" tape, don't just line it up with your fabric edge and start sewing. The twill tape lip on my rope cord is a little narrower than my 1/2" seam allowances, so I'm offsetting it a smidge from my fabric edges to account for that.
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| First Pass Sewing On the Lip Cord with Zipper Foot |
I'm starting my rope cord on the lower right side of the pillow, maybe 2-3" up from the bottom, leaving a loose "tail" at the beginning and ending similar to what you do when you're sewing binding onto a quilt. I've got my Zipper Foot 4D and Differential Feed engaged on my Bernina and I'm paying attention like I did at the serger to ensure that I'm not stretching or puckering my pillow fabric as I stitch on the trim. Although I have my zipper foot on the machine already, I'm not trying to get super close to the cord on this first pass of stitching. I just want to get the trim attached smoothly at the right seam allowance spacing, all the way around the pillow, so I can join those cut ends. I used a 2.5 stitch length and did not alter any machine settings.
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| Clip the Lip Tape at the Pillow Corners |
As I approach a corner, I make a perpendicular snip into the lip tape as shown above. Sometimes I make the snip in not-quite-the-right spot, and then I just make another snip and life goes on. ;-)
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| Rope "Core" Inside Decorative Threads Gets Trimmed Away at Join |
Joining the cord ends is a fiddly bother requiring two hands and full concentration, which is why I don't have step by step photos of the process. Each decorative cord trim is constructed a little differently, but this particular trim consists of shiny decorative threads woven into a pretty design around the outside of a plain, rough filler cord that has been dyed to match the decorative threads. I cut my trim tails at about 2" beyond where they overlapped, used my seam ripper to detach the rope cord from the lip cord right to the overlapping/joining up point, and then I unraveled the woven pretty cords almost to the join point to reveal the filler cord inside. I cut the filler cord off (but not the unravelled pretty threads) right at the join point, overlapped those loose unwoven threads, and pinched them down with my finger before sewing across the join at the machine.
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| Ready to Stitch the Cord Join |
See those escaping threads to the right of my fingernail as I took the photo above? All of those threads had to be corralled and tugged smoothly into the seam allowance before I stitched across to secure them, which was much more doable when I put the phone camera down and used both hands.
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| Cord Join After Stitching |
Side note: It's possible to painstakingly weave those decorative threads back together across the cord join for an amazingly invisible join, and I have done that with a different type of decorative rope cord made up of multiple braided decorative cords and no filler cord to trim away. Susan Woodcock of Home Dec Gal has a YouTube video here that demonstrates this method beautifully. Even if you are not planning on making any pillows with rope cord, you should go watch her video just because you will be in awe:
My rope trim has much thinner cords and a more intricate herringbone type weave pattern compared to what Susan was using in her video and I didn't feel confident that I could recreate the weave successfully, or that the effort in attempting to do that would pay off noticeably in the finished pillow. My goal with this project was just to eliminate the bulk that would have resulted if I'd overlapped the two cords without removing the filler bits, and to prevent the cut ends of the trim from further unravelling. I am satisfied with how this turned out.
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| Cord Join Will Look Like This |
This is something to think about when planning your pillows. Welt cording or piping, a trim you make yourself by covering plain filler cord with strips of fabric, is a lot easier to sew with no risk of a contrasting lip tape showing at the seams, and it's easier to join, too. Thicker fringes and decorative rope cords are more difficult to sew without puckering your fabric or having that lip show along the seams. Here's what my pillow front looks like with the rope cording attached and joined:
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| Trim Attached, Join Accomplished |
Remember that the first pass of sewing this trim was just to get it positioned properly relative to the fabric edges, which is impossible to do while also attempting to slam the cord up against your presser foot to get those stitches as close to the cord as humanly possible. After joining the ends of the cord, I sewed all the way around a second time with my focus on getting way up into that cord crevice. Then I flipped the pillow front wrong side up and sewed around the whole thing a third time, again actively smooshing and smashing the rope cord that I could feel through the fabric as close to the presser foot and needle as possible, all the way around.
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| After Third Pass of Stitching, Coral Lip Tape is Hidden In the Seam Allowance |
I flipped the seam allowance under along the edge of the pillow front to check whether I've sewn close enough to secure the coral lip tape within the seam allowance where it won't be visible and ruin the look of my finished pillow. I'll have another chance to sew closer along three sides of the pillow when I attach the pillow backs in the final step, but it's crucial that I've sewn as close as I can along the bottom of each pillow front before I put in the zippers.
Step Four: Sew Invisible Zippers to Pillow Bottoms
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| Zipper Sewn to Bottom Edge of Pillow Front (with Trim) First |
Instead of going into detail here, I'm just going to link to Linda Tully of Tully Drapery Shop's wonderful YouTube tutorial demonstrating how she sews invisible zippers in pillows that have rope cord trim. Linda's video is worth a thousand of my words and photos!
Notice that Linda is using an industrial straight stitch sewing machine, a no-frills professional workroom workhorse, rather than a fancy Bernina like mine. You do NOT need an expensive machine with bells and whistles for creating high end home dec projects. You just need a sewing machine in good working order that has sufficient needle penetration to stitch through multiple layers of heavyweight fabrics and thick trims.
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| Regular Zipper Foot #4D with Dual Feed Worked Best |
I do have an invisible zipper foot for my Bernina that I love for garment sewing but, after testing, I decided to use my regular #4D Zipper Foot with Dual Feed instead for these pillows. The invisible zipper foot was not letting me position the zipper teeth quite as close to my cording as I needed it for hiding all of the coral lip tape. I also tried (and subsequently ripped out) some machine basting stitches -- it really worked better for me to just pin the zipper and then sew "for real".
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| Zipper Attached to Pillow Front and Pillow Back |
Here's one thing I do differently from Linda's video tutorial: I prefer to finish off the cut ends of my zippers with thread rather than leaving them loose inside the pillow or covering them with fabric.
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| Machine Thread Tacking to Finish Off Zipper Ends |
I find this method faster and easier, and this way I don't have to worry about feeling the bulk of wrapped and stitched fabric through the finished pillow cover.
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| B990 Tackdown Stitch #25 is Great for Securing Zippers |
My Bernina B990 has a special Tackdown Stitch (#25) that I adjusted in width to 6.2 mm, until it just cleared the zipper teeth on both sides, but you can achieve the same thing with any zigzag stitch on a 9 mm sewing machine by setting the stitch length at or near zero and adjusting the width to clear your zipper teeth. Screenshot above shows how I'm using the nifty camera feature on my B990 (that most people think is only useful for machine embroidery) to see exactly where the stitches will land across my zipper teeth before I start stitching. It's a handy tool if you have it, but if your machine doesn't have this feature you can check your stitch width by manually lowering your needle slowly with the flywheel before you begin stitching, just as you would do before sewing buttons on by machine.
Step Five: Sew Remaining Three Pillow Sides
Once the zipper is in, I sew from the corners up to the start and stop of the zippers first, then pin up the remaining three sides (trying to keep those patterns aligned as much as I can) and sew them twice with my zipper foot. After sewing around the pillow on all sides the first time, I flip the pillow over and sew from the other side, pushing my zipper foot up hard against my cording both times. You are always able to get closer to the cord and hide more of the lip tape by restitching from the other side. And then it's just a matter of turning the pillow right side out, cramming the oversized pillow form into it (I think mine was a 90/10 feather/down insert sized at 14" x 24" for my pillow cover that measures approximately 13" x 22"). Ta-done!
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| Love My Pattern Match Across Top Seam of This Pillow |
Now you can see how the pattern matching pays off in the finished pillows. It's that little touch that elevates custom above readymade.
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| Pattern Match Along Sides Looks Good, Too |
Here's a shot of what that invisible zipper looks like once the pillow cover is turned and stuffed. It's not 100% honest-to-God invisible, which is why you want to match the zipper color to your fabric color. My second choice would have been matching the zipper to the rope cord color if I couldn't find a good match to my pillow fabric in a #4 invisible zipper. Remember, it's crucial to use a #4 invisible zipper and not the lighter weight, light duty #2 invisible zippers that go in skirts and dresses. If you ignore me, you will be screaming in frustration at the end of the project when you have completely sewn your pillow cover, cram the pillow insert into it, attempt to zip it closed, and the zipper teeth break apart because they can't handle the strain. Even if you manage to close the pillow initially with a #2 zipper, that zipper will be extremely likely to break in short order when people start using the pillow, or if the pillow cover ever needs to be removed for cleaning. If you're going to bother with this project at all, it's worth going to the extra trouble to get a zipper that can handle what you're asking it to do over the useful life of the pillow. You know what's no fun at all? Removing and replacing a broken invisible zipper in a completely finished pillow. ;-)
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| Pattern Match at Bottom Edge Along Invisible Zipper |
The decorative rope cord trim naturally rolls over and covers the invisible zipper, even with a fairly narrow cord like the one I'm using, and only the zipper pull is visible.
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| Cording Rolls Forward to Further Conceal Zipper, Only the Zipper Pull Shows |
Ta-Done! I finished the two pillows I wanted to make for my Hearth Room sofa! (Hearth Room is a goofy name, I know; that's what it says on the builder floor plan. It's just a small seating area off to one side of my kitchen).
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| Finished13 x 22 Throw Pillows with Invisible Zippers and Rope Cord Trim |
Bernie had to test the pillow immediately. Apparently it is not uncomfortable, or he would have thrown it across the room and said something like "why do we need all these pillows all over the place?"
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| Bernie is Testing Out the New Pillow |
I thought I'd share a couple photos of the pillows "in situ" and try to explain why I bothered making them in the first place. I mostly stuck to boring neutral fabrics for rugs and furnishings, to help keep the space bright and open and to make it easier for me to update the house in the future as my taste changes, trends change, or I get tired of what I picked. Custom throw pillows are a minimal investment, easy DIY project that gives you a huge bang for your buck and can give basic beige a lot more personality. Carefully selected pillow fabrics can even help solve decorating mistakes and act as a bridge to help other elements in the space to "go together" better. See how the background color of my pillow fabric is similar to the creamy color of the rug? I'm so glad I was intentional about pattern matching across the top edges of these pillows because I love the plus signs/crosses that resulted.
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| Top Edge of Pillows is Where Pattern Match is Most Visible |
Couldn't really get one picture to illustrate this, but all of the artwork throughout the kitchen, breakfast area and so-called hearth room (kitchen seating nook!) has red in it, and my new stove has red knobs. I wanted a little red in my throw pillows to tie in with that. Since I went really neutral throughout most of the main floor that was renovated, I'm choosing different colors for accent fabrics and artwork to give each room its own personality. You can see glimpses of the orange and blue artwork in the great room (living room) beyond the arched entrance. Next on my agenda will be dark blue velvet throw pillows with saffron welt trim for the great room couches.
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| Throw pillows Visually Connect with Rug, Carpet, etc. |
That's all you get from me today! I have two pillows to sew for my great room, two pillows to sew for my outdoor furniture (using special outdoor fabric and trim), and one old pillow that I'm thinking about taking apart and repurposing for two pillow fronts. I have another pillow fabric for the great room couches that is backordered to November as well. I think I might be all pillowed out by the time I finish with all of them! Wish me luck.
I'm linking up today's post with some of my favorite linky parties:
MONDAY
Design Wall Monday at Small Quilts and Doll Quilts
Monday Musings at Songbird Designs
TUESDAY
To-Do Tuesday at Quilt Schmilt
WEDNESDAY
Wednesday Wait Loss at The Inquiring Quilter
FRIDAY
Finished or Not Friday at Alycia Quilts
Off the Wall Friday at Nina Marie Sayre
Beauty Pageant at From Bolt to Beauty
SATURDAY
Scrap Happy Saturday at So Scrappy
SUNDAY
Frédérique at Quilting Patchwork Appliqué
Slow Stitching Sunday at Kathy's Quilts
Oh Scrap! at Quilting Is More Fun Than Housework
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