179: New York Yankees Pillow

Hey everyone. I made this pillow for my brother for Christmas.

I haven’t blogged in so long that I kind of forgot about taking pictures of the progress, so I just have the one photo.

But I have gotten a few questions about how I made the pillow, so… here’s what I did (animated GIF style). First, I looked up the image to use:

Then I roughly drew it out actual-size on a big piece of paper (which I made out of 4 pieces of printer paper taped together).

I think the actual insignia would be too skinny for a pillow, so I beefed it up a bit as I drew it. When I was finished, I had a nice pattern to trace onto some fabric.

But what fabric should I use? I have a whole bunch of fabric just laying around, from back when I planned to develop sewing skills. That never really happened. I get a fair amount of use from the ol’ sewing machine, but I pretty much always use a basic stitch, and throw it together like my life depends on producing a proof-of-concept prototype in the next 30 seconds.

I ended up choosing some blue upholstery fabric, because I had a lot of it, the NY Yankees are blue, and it’s going to be a pillow. So upholstery fabric seemed like a good choice.

I doubled it up, and cut both sides out at once with my rotary cutting wheel.

Every time I use the rotary cutting tool, I think two thoughts:

“Don’t cut off your finger… Don’t cut off your finger… Don’t cut off your finger… Don’t cut off your finger…”

and

“Using this is like slicing the world’s most precise pizza.”

After I cut out the faces, I measured around the perimeter to get an approximate length. Then I cut some strips about tw0 inches wide and joined them to make one long strip.

I sewed the strip along the edge of one of the faces. This step was pretty easy, and didn’t require any setup or pinning.

The other face was not nearly as easy, since the strip was already twisted around and sewn in place. I used a whole mess of pins to get it held together correctly. (The below GIF simplifies the process, and overlooks the bloodloss from the hundreds of pins.)

I left two sides open for stuffing, and turned the whole thing right-side-out.

Then, I just stuffed it and closed up the holes with some hand sewing.

The shape was pretty difficult to stuff. It was hard to get the stuffing into the various corners (which is why I left open two holes along the sides instead of just one).

This just in: My brother and his wife have sent extra pictures.

Here’s a closeup:

And here he is with the gift. It may look like he’s not too happy, but he actually loves it. He’s just unable to smile correctly in pictures (Get it together, man). It’s some sort of genetic abnormality he, and he alone, inherited from our father.

I know a few of you may be thinking, “OK, that’s cool, but what’s the deal with you being gone for 5 months?” I’ll get to that next time.