LIVE! Easy Sew: Cute and Colorful Pillow Series - Week 1

Hi National Sewing Circle. It's Emily Steffen from Oh Yay!Studio. And I am going to do a little recap of the video that I shared last Thursday as the first part of our National Sewing Circle pillow series. It's a mini series where we will be doing four pillows one every Thursday at 11:00 AM Central Time. And the first pillow we have is this tassel pillow.

And it's colorful. It's fun. It's so easy. I've seen many of these at very expensive stores like Anthropology. And I'm going to show you how to do this pillow cover and how to make the tassels really quickly.

And it's very fast and very fun. So basically for the pillow cover, if you want to with this, this pattern, you can go to your store go to Ikea, go to Target, go to Walmart, wherever online and find a pillow cover that is already made. If you want to. Or, what I did was just made a very basic pillow cover. Measured my pillow, the whole outside of the pillow.

This one was eighteen by thirteen, oh, nineteen by twenty. This one was nineteen by twenty. So I cut my very outside front twenty by twenty two? One inch bigger. I cut it one inch bigger to give myself a half inch seam allowance on all four sides.

And then on the back I just did an easy where it's two panels and it's overlaid. So you'll just cut your pillow, the same width right here and then you'll make it enough so it overlaps. Hemmed these on each side really quickly. And then that was the first step, is to hem each one. And then I'm going to show you quickly how to do a tassel, cause that is the main part of this pillow.

And it's very easy. Tassels are like the friend to a pom-pom. So essentially you will need scissors, some cardboard, the yarn or the string you want, and then some embroidery floss. So very easy. And you'll cut your cardboard which will become your tassel maker about the size that you want your pom-pom in length.

The width doesn't much matter but the length is what's going to matter here. So cut it. I did my palms about or tassels about three inches and you can do them longer. You can do them shorter. It depends on how big your pillow is and how how fuzzy or how fringy you want your tassel.

So I will just start by wrapping my yarn in this not super tight, just in this middle section here, oopsies, and you are going to fill it as probably about as much as you want your tassel to be so as thick or as wide or as kind of large as you want your tassel to be. So if you want it to be crazy thick, then I would wrap a lot of times if you want it to be thin, don't wrap as many times and the thinner, the yarn you're using the more fine or more simple the tassel will be but the thicker the yarn you're using obviously, the more fluffy the tassel is going to be and the more furry it's going to be. So just keep that in mind for the amount of wrapping. So wrap about, you know, an inch-ish, depending on how much you want it to be. Trim the yarn and embroidery floss.

Cut a good chunk. I would say a good foot because this is what's going to be not only wrapping your tassel but it's also going to be the piece that you thread in to attach your embroidery floss or, attach your tassel to your pillow. So essentially you want to get your embroidery floss through here to just string it through right here under here, so that it's through the loops. And now you're just going to kind of shimmy as one unit. Shimmy the whole thing was one unit right off of your cardboard.

So this is why you don't want to make it crazy tight when you're wrapping it. So this is what you will look like and you're wanna do your best to keep it as one unit here. Take your tassel, and you're going to make essentially wrap your embroidery floss around the top to make a knob. And that's what's going to hold your tassel in place. So you can lay this down, you can hold it in your hand.

I think there's many methods that make it work but you're gonna want it tight, tight, tight. So it's a little bit tricky to see, but Whoa I just made it not a chunk. So here you're making it to wrap around the top. I would say knuckle length or a little bit more, a little bit less. And you're wrapping both of these around to tie it pretty tightly.

Cause this is what's going to kind of make the tassel portion. And now tie it in a couple of knots to make sure it's secure. Tassels are easy, easy, easy and kids love to make these. okay. So the cool thing about a tassel and a pom is that you will trim it to make it perfect.

So you never have to do the steps perfect. Which I kind of love. See how there's the knob at the top. And then here's the hanging pieces. So all you're going to do is to finish your tassel is cut your loops with some sharp scissors so that now it's very tassel-y and then give it a good trim to the length that you want it.

You can kind of fluff it up a little to make sure it's nice and straight across. It's kind of like giving a good haircut. There we go. There is your tassel. Now for my pillow, I made I have eight colors, eight colors.

I did three tassels of each color. So as I was making my tassels, I was kind of laying them out on the pillow to think, Oh, do I need more? Do I need less? Where am I going to lay them out? You could make this in a heart.

You can make this in a letter. You can make this in any shape or any embellishing you want. You could cover the entire pillow in tassels if you really wanted to, but there's two options for attaching your tassels. You can either hot glue, just hot glue these right on here which would make it a very simple sort of no-sew project or what I did is I threaded my after I laid them all out on my pillow, like this laid them all out and I had them in the place I wanted. I pick them up color by color.

So kind of three at a time. And I knew where I wanted them to be. I threaded a needle on each one of these. So needle on this, poked it through, needle on this, poked it through and then just tied it right on the backside. So you'll just start attaching all your tassels to the front and then your very last step to finish up your pillow which I demonstrated it in the longer video is that you will attach your front to your back, right sides together.

And it's a very easy way to make a pillow, a pillow cover because it is no zipper and I'm all about no fuss. And no zipper when I'm making. So join me this next week at 11:00 AM Central Time. We are going to be making a rainbow pillow with cloud pom-poms on Thursday. So thanks for watching.