Finished Calavera Pillow! and TAST Week 5

It seems like I spent about six weeks working on all these different projects without finishing anything, and now they’re getting finished all at once. I stitched most of the marigolds on the calavera project while I was at the music festival, then got the few petals done a few days ago. And today at lunchtime I made the pillow cover:

Calavera pillow

The embroidery pattern is Calavera by Carina Envoldsen-Harris of Polka & Bloom. For the cover, I read the instructions in my copy of the Reader’s Digest Guide to Sewing before I started drawing up my schematic just to make sure I knew what I was doing. I used the angled corners from Green Bee’s MicroMod patchwork pillow tutorial, and St. Martha kindly helped me figure out how much overlap I wanted for the buttoned back.

These are my first buttonholes ever. I think they maybe look a little dodgy, but maybe that’s just because the bulk of the pillow is sliding the buttons to one end of the buttonholes.

Calavera pillow - back

I’m really happy with how this came out! The only thing I might change is to stuff a little extra polyfill in the corners. Even with the angled corners, they’re still a bit floppy — the pillow form is really nice and cushy but its corners are a little wimpy, and a few bits of extra stuffing would probably fix that right up.

Oh, and my sort of iffy-looking schematic, which is probably of no interest to anyone but me, but it’ll be handy to have it here if I ever need it again since I’ve probably already lost the piece of paper:

Pillow cover schematic

TAST - Take a Stitch Tuesday

And I’ve been working on my TAST sampler again! I don’t think I ever posted week 4 when I did it a few weeks ago, so here goes:

TAST sampler, week 5

Row 4: Open cretan stitch
Row 5: Closed cretan stitch. (Maybe. I think I might’ve been doing it wrong — I couldn’t see how it was different from open cretan stitch apart from spacing.)
Row 6: Herringbone stitch and tacked herringbone stitch.
Row 7: Laced herringbone stitch and double herringbone stitch.

I broke out my Reader’s Digest guide to needlework last night and had fun trying all the different varieties of herringbone stitch it showed. I had some trouble keeping the width even, a little less so on the bottom row where I put some tick marks to try to even things out a little.

2 Comments

  1. Carina
    June 12, 2013

    Oh my god, that pillow is absolutely gorgeous! You make my pattern look really really good! Thank you. :-)

  2. Queenie Patch
    June 12, 2013

    With all the stitches you are learning, you can soon make another fantastic pillow! You have a great sense for colour.

Comments are closed.