Yay, I’ve made something pretty for my house, or rather two somethings.  Two pretty pillow covers for the pillows on my couch.

(Actually, from the picture below you can see that I had the bases for three, but I’ve only got two of them complete right now and also only two couch pillows, so that third one might languish, unfinished for…a bit.  Not forever, though.  It was too very satisfying sewing with such yummy colors; I know I’ll want to do the last one before too long.)

The origin story for these pillow covers is this.  Some years ago, I was given several very, very nice silk slipcases that had been hand-dyed by my aunt.  They were/are very lovely, and I had been using a couple of them in other parts of the house, but they weren’t getting the display they deserved for two reasons.  1) We tend to use very large pillows on our couch, and these were normal-people-sized couch-pillow slip covers.  2) Being silk, they’re a bit delicate, and even without pets, our household is just not very gentle with delicate general-use items.  When I had the couple of in-use pillows in the living room, they’d been starting to get damaged.

However, in mending one of them, I’d found that top-stitching onto a cotton base seems to go a long way to making the beautiful silk much sturdier.  And so, I decided to take apart the slipcovers that had been sadly languishing, and use some decorative* top-stitching to secure them to new bases.

*decorative: I use the term loosely; actually-fancy top-stitching really isn’t in my current skill-set.

And this plan, then, gave me the chance to combine one set of beautiful fabrics with other beautiful fabrics – yay patchwork! my favorite thing!  (I did need more of something, of course, if I was going to make pillow covers that were larger…)

The design I eventually came up with was based partly off the drapes I’d made for the living room some years back (and included some of the yummy orange silk I had left from that project) but with also a focus on showing off as much of the beautiful hand-dyed silk from my aunt as I could.  I think the effect is rather like a stained-glass window pane.  And that’s especially the case when you look at the base before it’s sewn into a pillow-cover shape, which is what’s shown in the two pictures below.

I didn’t get a sequence of pictures that illustrates sewing everything down to the base, but as you can see, it’s pretty much all top-stitching of layered pieces, using the iron to tuck the top-layer edges under and size those top layers as seems pleasing.  If you haven’t tried something like that before, the main thing to note is that you can definitely pin the whole thing together before sewing it down, but when you sew it down, you start with the bottom-most layers and work your way up, smoothing things out and re-pinning as necessary as you go.  (I.e., I switched the thread out in the sewing machine back and forth and back and forth a whole bunch.)

Once the base was done, construction of the actual pillow cover began, starting with making sure I knew where to put the two main folds so that the pillow-cover would come out to the right size, and the design would be centered nicely for each side of the finished cover.

The very last panel of the design hadn’t been sewn on yet so that I could adjust its positioning relative to this step, which was done in combination of folding the far-top edge over and topstitching that fold in place.

And then it was time for the zipper.  When I folded over the far-top edge, I made sure there was enough of a flap created to fully accommodate the zipper.  Then the order of operations was: 1) Sew the zipper to the flap (it looks face-down, but it’s not, since the layer with the flap is the top-most layer of ‘face-up’).  2) Secure the flap (and the zipper it now holds) to the main fabric by re-top-stitching the border from the other side.  3) Pin the other side of the zipper to the other end of the cover and sew it to that side by unzipping it to give yourself proper access.

Yay, you have a zipper that aligns the design perfectly!

Next, I turned the whole thing inside-out to sew the long edges.  The two key bits there were: 1) Clip the fabric to create alignment guides so that everything is oriented the way you want it to be oriented when you reverse it.  2) After sewing the first long edge, be sure to mostly un-zip the zipper!  That way you have a way to turn it right-side-back-out again.

And that’s it.  Yay for pretty pillow covers, with pretty hand-dyed silk windowpanes!