Saturday, September 26, 2009

Photo pillows


I saw a version of this in Martha Stewart's Encyclopedia of Crafts, which is a great book, and I would advise everyone to either buy it or check it out from the library. She did her pictures with a blue hue instead of sepia like mine and hers also didn't have the color borders on top and bottom. I started with a cream colored fabric made especially to go through a printer. You can also make your own printer-ready fabric with a solution called Bubble Jet Set 2000), but I couldn't find it anywhere. I cut the photos out leaving a 1/4 inch border (or larger depending on your twill tape size) and even wider on the outside border. Make sure the borders are all the same length (except for the outside borders).


Then I placed them in the order i liked and glued the borders together. Next, I sewed cream-colored twill tape over the white borders to make it look nice and to stabilize the photos. To stabilize the fabric even more, I glued more twill tape over the white borders on the back as well (see below).

I cut the maroon borders to the photo fabric length and to my desired width (i wanted a medium-sized pillow) and pinned the borders and the photo fabric on the wrong sides and sewed together. I measured and cut cream fabric (for the back panel) the size of the fabric photos/maroon borders and pinned them wrong-side out and sewed three sides together and hand-sewed the remaining side after I put the stuffing in. I used stuffing because that's what I had, but I highly recommend buying an already made pillow insert for this project. It's much easier and I think it looks nicer.

There is so much you can do with fabric photos. I chose landscape pictures I took from Mt. Rainier, but you could use photos of your family, different color hues, etc.

4 comments:

  1. That is SO cool! I love the pictures you used, too - makes me think I need to visit Mt. Rainier someday!

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  2. yes, you should visit! Everyone should. It is truly breathtaking. The Paradise side of the mountain has great views of the 14,000 ft snowy peak (it's so surreal that it looks photoshopped in all my pictures) while the Sunrise side looks like the Swiss Alps (or from what I've seen of the Alps in pictures and on the discovery channel) with fields of wildflowers and clear blue lakes and rivers. It makes me wonder why I live in Houston.

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  3. WOW Kallan! So, where do you find printable fabric??

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  4. I got it from hobby lobby, but it's also at Jo-Anns, Michaels, and Walmart. I never noticed it before but it's next to the t-shirt transfer stuff. But I recommend to use the Bubble Jet Set stuff and using your own fabric because the pictures are still kind of stiff.

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