I've been trying to find the boys new pillows for daycare for a while now. Henry's is too small for his growing head and the one Thomas' former daycare teacher made him was getting pretty lumpy after repeated washings. I kept seeing girl themed pillow and blanket sets at Target, but nothing for boys. Then we randomly saw a Darth Vader set in the clearance aisle last week! The boys wanted them so much, but the blankets were too big for the sleep mats at school and even the clearance price was a bit much for just a pillow.
So I had the brilliant idea that I could just make them pillows! I had been to Joann's Fabric a few weeks ago for mom to pick up some things and had seen a whole rack of Star Wars themed fabrics. After doing some reading online for ides, I decided to buy small pillows and make them pillow cases. That way I could wash the cases every week instead of the whole pillow.
The plans I found online were for bigger pillows, so I did some math to make proportionally sized cases for little kid sized pillows. I was so proud of myself for buying fabric got ready to cut everything out. Which is when I realized I really had no clue what I was doing...
I have only sewn two things in my life that I can recall - an incredibly lumpy and not straight at all pillow and a pair of pajama pants. I did pretty good on the pajamas, but I had a pattern to pin to the fabric for cutting. I really had no clue how to cut this fabric in a straight line. I didn't have anything besides a sharpie to mark on the fabric and no straight edge long enough to mark all the way across. Plus I had bought the wrong size fabric and had to sew two cut pieces of it to make it long enough for the band(s).
I was not off to a great start!
Then we couldn't get the sewing machine to work... It's one of Grannie's old ones that we have had forever and we have used it successfully before, but we had no luck today. The manual in the case was for a different machine, so I was googling the manual to see if it had any helpful information (not really!). We ended up Face-timing with Grannie to try and see if she could help. She ended up showing Matt a youtube video she found and we decided something on our machine was just not working correctly.
Thankfully, Heather had just gotten a sewing machine for Christmas and she didn't mind loaning it to me! I think she'd do anything for her nephews...! She hadn't even taken the strapping tape off of it yet, so I did at least get it all set up for her. Hers has a built-in needle threader on it (so fancy!) and the bobbin worked like a champ. I was ready to get sewing!
I didn't get any in-action photos because I was very focused on trying to not mess these pillowcases up! And I was following a description without entirely knowing I knew what the process was going to be. Overall, I think I did a pretty good job - I messed up the seams a little, but the pattern I was following did blind seams. It required sewing the seams once the wrong way at 1/4", trimming them, then sewing them the other way at 1/4". I got the process just fine, but I had a ton of trouble trying to sew at 1/4" with my not perfect initial cutting. I think next time I would just give myself more material to start with!
The final result! This one is Thomas' pillow. Matt requested that I find fabric that wasn't just Darth Vader. Apparently them loving the bad guy bothers him a little. My argument is always that at least Darth Vader loved his mother! But I did manage to find fabrics with a better distribution of light & dark side characters.
Henry loved his pillow! As soon as I gave it to him, he ran to get his daycare blanket from the laundry room and proceeded to pretend nap all over the house. How adorable is that?!? Of course, he assumed both of the pillows belonged to him since Thomas was still asleep. The moment he realized they weren't was quite traumatic and involved a few tears. But he cheered up pretty quickly - he still has one awesome pillow, after all!
I may have been so excited to give Thomas his pillow that I woke him up from his nap. I mean, he had been asleep more than his usual nap time, but he still wasn't very happy to be woken up. And he didn't even care about his pillow at first. :(
But he did finally start carrying it around and even used it as a place to hide from mommy's camera. So I am quite sure he will love it once he is no longer grumpy! :)