Guest Blogger: Tracy from All Thumbs Crafts!

Hey all, give it up for Tracy from All Thumbs Crafts with a guest post on a fab pillow tutorial for us today!  Be sure to visit her blog and tell her you found her from SSB!

Hey, everybody. I'm so happy to be here guest posting on Ginger's fun blog. Ginger gave my All Thumbs Crafts' blog one of its very first features ever, which was so encouraging to me! (Thank you, Ginger)!

So I guess with guest blogging, you tell a little bit about yourself. Well, here goes...I'm a single mom who is fortunate to be able to work out of the home as a freelance writer. Back in October, 2010, I started my own blog called The Prairie Patch. It mainly deals with prim decor, but since I have such eclectic tastes, I started up All Thumbs Crafts. It's there where I share my latest crafting experiments. 

 

My other blogs are: Craft Supplies Sales and Resources, North Pole Diaries, Handmade Teddy Bears and Raggedies, and the Sunburnt Cow Handmade Shop. The latter two feature various artisans who sell handmade items. I also have two link parties: one on the Prairie Patch, which deals with prim decor items and goes from Sundays to Wednesdays, and the Sunburnt Cow, which runs from Wednesdays to Sundays. The Sunburnt Cow link party is slightly different from other link parties in that I encourage those who have blog posts revolving around handmade items they have for sale to link up. This party can be anything handmade; it's not strictly in the prim/old fashioned look.

Additionally, the Sunburnt Cow will be holding its first Udderly Amazing New Shop Contest beginning April 1st. The contests will be once a month, rotating between Sunburnt Cow and the Teddies and Raggedies blogs. If you know of artisans who have new online shops that could fit into either general handmade items or teddies/raggedies, please pass the info along to them!

Now that we have my intro completed, let me share a super easy tutorial for those of us who aren't sewing whizzes and who also want to upcycle, recycle, repurpose, or whatever you want to label it. :)

 

 

Got a pair of jeans that you don't want to toss out? Why not make them into a jeans pillow!? They're so shabby chic, and you can embellish them to suit your style and personality!

As you can see with the above picture, even those worn patches can be "works of art". :) I knew I'd like how the worn out patch would look on the pillow, but I also knew I wanted to put something else in the middle. That's why I moved the leg seams to the middle of each side of the pillow so that the worn patch would be in the corner. Cute, huh?

You could probably surmise how to do this without a tutorial, but I'll share a tip for those who are sewing challenged like myself. Use straight leg pants because those are a lot easier to make into pillows: you'll only have one seam to sew. Otherwise, one side of the pillow will be longer than the other. You can always fix it by sewing it so it's more even, but I like things as simple as possible when it comes to sewing. And since I want to only sew one side, I cut the pant leg near the bottom, where there's already a seam.

Then decorate it the way you want. In the first photo, I wrapped some purple plaid around the pillow (after I stuffed it) and did a little hand sewn seam in the back. Then I wrapped a rag strip of fabric and added buttons.

 

If you're going to sew buttons, patches, or anything like that, don't sew your seam just yet. In this way, you can hand sew whatever you want a lot easier than if you had sewn the one side shut. I learned that the frustrating way!

As I mentioned above, with using the bottom of the pant leg as the opening of the pillow, you have a ready made seam. Now that's my kind of sewing project, i.e., very little sewing! :) (Or, as you can see in the first photo, you can roll up the ends like you do with some jeans - if you're short like me).

To make this really shabby chic and eco-friendly, I also used scraps of fabric to stuff my pillows. Then just sew some buttons on the end to close up the opening or sew a smaller "pillow" inside with ugly fabric you don't like, stuff it with rags, and then slip it inside your jeans pillow.

And voila! A great way to use up things that would otherwise get tossed or sit in storage for years.

Alrighty then!  A great way to re-cycle!  Thanks Tracy!
Hope everyone enjoyed that!  Be sure to check out Feature Fridays and see if you wanna participate!

Ginger

SSB