Octopus Pillows

A simple pillow project  with Spoonflower Fabric

My daughter loves all things octopus. IDK why, but I'm a willing contributor to her collection.

When I saw this fabric at Spoonflower, I knew it would be perfect for her living room pillow collection. Her husband wonders why there are so many pillows on the sofa--one is perfect, he thinks, for his napping needs. DD disagrees.

Here's the fabric from Spoonflower for the face of the pillows. It's a minky fabric in 54 inch width:

Closeup:

For the back of the pillow, I used I used a 100% polyester plush 50 x 60 inch throw that I purchased from Stein Mart

In order to get a 16 inch square pillow with the octopus centered, it took some doing. It took a full yard to get two motifs that had enough of an edge around them to work.

I made a knife-edged envelope-style pillow. Here is a  You Tube video that shows the process involved in making this simple pillow.

I purchased the 16 inch pillow forms at Walmart. 

 The completed pillows:

 

 I made a deep 5-inch overlap and underlap in the back so that no part of the pillow form would peek out. I also used the finished edge of the throw for the edges of the overlap and underlap.

The plush fabric backing wanted to stretch, so I serged all the edges except the finished edge of the throw with the differential feed setting of the serger adjusted to minimize stretch. Then I reinforced the inside edge of the envelope flap with clear elastic with about half an inch of negative ease to keep it in place:

 And here is an action shot of my DD's rescue dog #2, Sprout, doing her Vanna White imitation, showing off the pillows in my daughter's living room. 

I'm really not big into home dec sewing. I much prefer garment sewing. But these pillows were a surprise for my daughter and she loves them. For my kid, I'll even do home dec sewing (hand-to-forehead with deep sigh. *wink* )

Kathryn