Home is Where the Hearthstone is

This was a quick project I did as a housewarming present for someone. I was foolish and didn't get many (ie. any) shots of the process. There's also really only two shots of the final product.

I used binder paper to make a quick template of the spiral and pillow shape (which, given the pen I used, turned out to be a very messy endeavor). I used the same patchwork-style for applying the spiral to the outside of the stone as I did in my Companion Cube pillow.

The pillow is made out of a soft woolen fabric and the spiral is polar fleece. I liked it because it was smoky with the two shades of blue.

You can't see in my photos, but the pillow is actually about 1.5-2 inches thick. I cut a rectangle strip of fabric and ran it around the whole edge to give the pillow some depth as opposed to just being a front and back stuck together. If I can get my hands on a photo that shows that off, I'll add it up here later.

I made the swirl design go opposite directions on each side so that if the grey were transparent, you wouldn't see a conflicting design in the blue. When you flip the pillow over, the design curls the other way.

Whole project took about two hours. It was a very quick way to kill time, but I still like it.

Companion Pillow

Gave myself a little day project about a week ago. Was on a kick after finally being able to play Portal 2 (had to wait until I was out of school, or else I never would have gotten any work done!). I'd been eyeing ThinkGeek's Companion Cube plushie since forever ago (i.e. it's appearance on the site), but being the poor college student that I am, I'm unwilling to hand over the money at this point in time. Also, there's something way more satisfying about having a snuggly companion sprung from my own hands.

Using two sheets of legal printer paper, I created a 14x14 square base pattern to be the starting point for my project. Using two different sized plates in order to get perfect circles, I traced out the shapes on the paper and gave myself a lovely two-dimensional face of the cube. Then I traced out over and made little pattern pieces for each of the patch parts. Lots of math to get everything placed equally around the center, but nothing too hard. My English degree-in-progress is thankful.

The next day, I went to the store and picked up all the required materials from the local fabric store: fleece in a dark and light grey and in a baby pastel pink, light grey and pink thread, and some double-sided heat bond. I used the dark grey fleece to make two 14x14 squares, then used the other pattern pieces to cut out the patches to make the design work. The patches were ironed to the adhesive bond first, just to help the material hold it shape once I started sewing everything together. Starting with the pink, I stitched the heart to the center circle, then the lines to the dark grey base. One piece layered on top of the next until I had a little patchwork representation of the cube's face.

It was a quick stitch, simple patch form as opposed to doing the whole ... correct way of sewing with seams and all that. Who does that, really? Pshaw. And because I'm weird, I thought the back side of the cube face was really cool with all the stitching. It makes me happy.

Place the two grey sheets face to face, design on the inside, sew all the way around, leaving a gap on the bottom to turn it inside out (just a little bit bigger than the center light grey patch). Turn right-side out, cram full of squishy, bouncy polyester fiber fill, hand stitch the gap closed, and viola! My new snuggle pillow. =3