DIY Zig-Zag Pillow

I wasted no time in making use of that awesome frabric I picked up at an estate sale last week. Remember this?

I made this the next day:

I think the colors are really more suitable for fall, but I love it so much I can’t bear to put it away just yet.

It turns out that the orange floral fabric was a very long and narrow piece, not really wide enough to be very versatile. So I googled around for ideas to use small pieces of it and found this:

from Made During Quiet Time

How cute! I googled some more and found this tutorial to loosely base my efforts on and we were in business.

I had a 17″ pillow form already, so I cut my orange fabric into 17″x3″ strips. I used my new cardboard thingamabobber, which I’ve since been informed is intended to be used for drafting patterns.I really struggle with cutting straight lines and found this to be a big help. I kind of wish I’d cut my strips a littler wider, like 4 or 5 inches, for chunkier zigzags.

Then I folded them in half lengthwise and pressed them with an iron.

Next I measured every 1.5″ and made a dot along the pressed edge. I realized later that I could have avoided the step of pressing them in half lengthwise and just used a ruler to make sure I marked in the center of the fabric. I didn’t have any fabric markers around so I tested a ball-point pen in an inconspicuous spot to make sure it wouldn’t bleed through, then used it to make my dots.

I cut from the outer edge to each dot, alternating which side I cut from.

The next few steps are probably better explained by the original tutorial, and at this point I was so “in the zone” that I forgot to take pictures, but I’ll give it a shot. I folded down the corners to make a zig-zag pattern and pressed. This is where I wished I hadn’t pressed it in half originally. My zig-zags didn’t really want to stick down, so I ironed only a few folds at a time, putting a heavy book over each section to “set” the folds as the fabric cooled.

After all my zigs were zagged, I arranged them on a 17″ square piece of off-white fabric that I’d cut from the same estate sale fabric stash. I glued the points down with fabric glue to keep the arrangement in place and then zigged and zagged with my sewing machine ’til they were all sewed down and 100% cat-proof.

I made an envelope closure by cutting two pieces of the same off-white fabric to 12″x17″ each. I hemmed one 17″ side of each, then put my zig-zagged piece zigzags up and layered the two smaller pieces over it, making sure the hems faced the inside middle and all the outside edges lined up. Then I sewed all around the perimeter, trimmed the corners, turned that baby inside out, and stuffed my pillow inside.

This is the third pillow I’ve sewn in my lifetime and it is the third one to turn out more rectangular than square. Not exactly sure what I’m doing wrong. I initally intended the zig-zags to be horizontal, but with my slightly rectangular result I think that they look better running vertically.

I love it!