Friday, July 13, 2012

Just a pincushion



I made a pincushion this morning before I went off to have a lunch and whist date with my wonderful, simply fabulous, best-est buddies.  I have been using a thrown together pincushion that I made several years ago.  It fits the bill but I stuffed it with really lightweight floofy stuffing and the pincushion is light as a feather.  This results in several "issues."  Firstly the pins sink right into it and this makes it more difficult to pull the pins out of the cushion.  The other issue is that I often send the pincushion flying into space as I am quilting.  I needed a pincushion with a lot more heft.  So... enter this 6" by 6" number.  I made a simple little 16 patch block with lots of random brights and I even found some quilting text to border it with.  Snazzy!!!!  The back is Happy Butterfly by Sandi Henderson.  I quilting both the front and the back with some batting.  The back has heavy duty straight lines close together.  Then I crammed the cushion and I mean crammed it with all sorts of batting scraps and other random fabric scraps.  Did this work?  Well,  hmmm.  The cushion has fabulous weight now.  If I knock it around while quilting, it will be less likely to go flying across the room but I do find that the batting scraps are not the most pin friendly.  You have to stab the pin into the cushion quite vigorously.  I think if I were to do this again, I would use the batting scraps after and around a inner pillow of  crushed walnut shells.  Yep.  That is what I would do.  In fact I may still do that.  Happy weekend and hope you had a fabulous Friday the 13th!

2 comments:

  1. Yes, the crushed walnut shells are wonderful to use. They give weight and it is easy to stick pins into. I made several and just used a little poly fiberfil around the opening to keep the walnut filling from popping out as I stitched it closed.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh well it looks really cute and practice makes perfect. I use a magnetic pin cushion and am so used to it now that I can't imagine using anything else.

    ReplyDelete