Custom Order of Pillows

Recently, a friend asked me to do a custom order of pillows for a wedding gift.  And because I can’t say no to anyone, I got out my laptop and started digitizing their invitation artwork and slapped it on some fabric and sewed a series of lovely pillowcases.

custom embroidered pillowcase

I was glad their artwork was line art as it made for an easy embroidery job.  Though, they did want gold thread, which is always a pain to work with.  Metallic threads constantly snap when you sew with them.

Once the job was finished and the pillows were delivered, I had some extra supplies left over and I hit up my home-girl, Jess, and asked if she wanted to learn how to sew pillowcases.

Jess learning to sew pillowcases

The hardest part was the cutting the fabric up for a very large pillow.   We worked through folding fabric to cut on a small mat and then sewed the pieces together.

I pretty quickly realized how spoiled I am with my monster sewing machine at home that threads itself and auto adjusts for different fabrics.  The fleece she picked out for her pillows was slipping and sliding all over, but with a few pointers she was sewing pillowcases like a pro!


jess' fabric painted pillow cases

After our little sewing session she went on to make more pillowcases and even did some fabric painting on them!  She painted them so well I thought she had bought precut iron-ons.

I actually taught someone something, so that was pretty cool.

Business Embroidery Patches

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A friend asked me to make some embroidery patches for his work.  Which, at first, I rolled my eyes.   Then, to my surprise, he sent me the image.   For once, someone actually knew exactly what they wanted.  THAT I can work with.  I rolled my eyes back from inside my head and got to work.

I grabbed my laptop and pulled up my embroidery software and started poking around.  Embroidery software — good software — is extremely expensive.  We’re talking thousands.  So it was nice to have a new project to actually use it on.

Digitizing artwork for embroidery isn’t very easy.  The software is great, but there’s a lot to know.   My first few attempts at stitching this out were flops.  I realized pretty quickly how the layers were building up and getting too thick to stitch.   A needle broke on one of them trying to get the letters on top of 2 other layers.

Finally, I got the project down to 2 layers: a background and lettering.  I could’ve even got it down to 1 layers, but I wasn’t confident it would look great when it was done based off what I was seeing on the screen.   It looked like there would it was producing a gap between the letters and background. So I did 2 layers and slowed the machine way down to minimize mistakes and breaking of needles.

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It looks like it came out great.  Though I am wondering if they’ll say it has the wrong colors.  The problem is that businesses have very specific colors for their brand and embroidery thread does not come in a color range that will support that pickiness.  I sent it off last weekend so I hope to hear back that they like it.