For years I avoided learning how to sew in a zipper. I wanted to make wristlets for my Etsy shop, but was completely intimidated at the thought of sewing a zipper. Until one day, with a tutorial in hand, I just buckled down at my sewing machine and schooled myself on zippers. To my surprise…there was nothing remotely difficult about it at all. Fast forward to last week when I started working on this pillow. Initially, I was just going to make two flaps on the back that overlap and hold the pillow in place. I didn’t want to do a zipper, because I thought it would be too bulky of a look for my pillow. Then, I stumbled onto the invisible zipper. I had seen them before, but always assumed they were difficult. I mean they’re invisible? There has to be some degree of difficulty to invisible-ness. I was wrong. So wrong.
Anyway, I’m in the middle of a room re-do. A while back, I had posted about redoing Annabelle’s old room for Jacks. I was going to give him a room to himself and put the two girls in a room together. They were to have bunk beds and Jacks was gonna have this really cool spindle bed I’ve been storing in my garage. Well, as soon as Jacks heard the girls were gonna have bunk beds, he wanted one too. Of course. So, my plans were altered and Mr. Jacks & Kate built the bunk bed for Jacks and Savannah. I’m now in the process of outfitting their beds with pillows.
I found this invisible zipper tutorial here. I read it through a few times, then I did my thing. Way easy! In fact, I like it better than a regular zipper install. Though, you can sew these with a regular zipper foot, I opted to buy the invisible zipper foot for my machine.
After reading up on the invisible zipper, I pulled out my poor man’s linen {Osnaburg} and whipped up this little cutie. You may have noticed one of the latest design trends is the hexagon. I asked myself, Why the hexagon? I don’t know. It just works…six sides and all that. I wanted to implement it into an appliqué design on a pillow. However, I didn’t want to just slap on one giant hex…because that would be weird. Instead, I thought maybe a bunch of small ones, sporadically placed. And so, this scattered hexagon pillow was born.
Materials I used:
- Invisible zipper
- Osnaburg fabric
- Scrap pieces of fabric
- Scissors
- Appliqué supplies {found here}
- 18 x 18 pillow insert
Refer to my appliqué tutorials found here and here.
Cut pillow fabric to required size.
Make a hexagon template.
Using the template, trace desired amounts of hexagons onto Heat n’ Bond.
Iron together interfacing, fabric, and Heat n’ Bond.
Cut out hexagons.
Arrange hexagons in a scattered design, leaving a small space between them.
Iron down and appliqué using a zig zag stitch on the front piece of the pillow fabric.
Sew pillow cover with invisible zipper.
I love the end result! It’s exactly how I had envisioned!
