Sunday, August 7, 2011

Re-creation of an Anthro find



Antrhopologie Pillow


Anthro version:


my version:






I found this Anthro pillow copy tutorial through a blow I follow, called Adventures in Dressmaking.  I was inspired to make my own!  I love the Anthro version, but NOT for $88.00.


One of the things that attracted me most to this project was the idea of using up a lot of the tiny scraps that I save from project to project.  I never know what I will use all of it for, but for some reason I still save it all.  This pillow required having a stash of different and varying fabrics, so it was a perfect discovery.


I followed the techniques of the tutorial linked above.  I used a light-weight fusible interfacing on the back of the main fabric, but I didn't fuse it until part way through sewing the petals on.  In retrospect, I should have fused it before I started sewing to reinforce the thin muslin.  Cutting out the shapes took a while, but I just popped in a movie and took my time sifting through my scraps and cutting out the shapes.  I just kind of eyeballed the shapes of the petals, so they are all slightly different.  I used a glue stick to temporarily adhere the petal to the muslin.  When I had all of the petals cut and glued, I top-stitched the petals on with a zigzag stitch, as you can see more clearly in the pictures below.  I didn't sew around each petal, but instead went around the whole flower's circumference by layer.  That choice saved a lot of time and thread.


The pillow has orange cording around the edges, and a sham back instead of a zipper.  I used bias tape to cover the raw edges on the back sham pieces. Right now I only have one pillow, but I think it needs a matching friend.  That means I need to go to Ikea and get some more inside pillows to cover.  Oh darn!


One of my favorite things about the pillow, is that each of the fabrics on it has a story.  I can look at it and think about all the people I made things for with that particular fabric.  If you go back through my projects in older blogs, you'll see where a lot of the fabrics came from.  Do you see the fabric I used to make you something?