CHICKPEA SEWING STUDIO

 

 

The house I visited in Chicago was just as wonderful and warm as my friend Alice herself. She had just moved in a few months before and her furniture had not yet arrived leaving the space airy and bathed in winter light. It made me yearn for a change on my way home where I started moving furniture around, replacing slipcovers and sewing pillows. One thing I have to give to my plain Ikea couches is how fast and inexpensive it can be to change them completely. Especially if you are willing to give whatever is being discontinued a chance. Here a linen like number made it home with us, as well as a dark blue cover for a chair. To make sense of the color scheme I created those pillows using an upholstery weight twill, some very wide twill tape and Urban Threads Miniature Menagerie pack. Since Ikea makes a limited number of pillow inserts sizes I make my pillows 20"x20" or 16"x24". The Bernina 580 is delivered with a good size oval hoop. The spyglass for example was enlarged to fill the hoop. The text was programmed strait from the 580 internal memory. I seemed to have reversed the N on the butterfly pillow... oh well!

 

Simply re-hooping the fabric and adding designs gives the illusion of a much larger embroidery surface in my opinion. By using the smaller, medium hoop I was able to embroider the tags on the side of the pillows. I used the same words as the design kit "entomology and explore" but again used the 580's alphabets which I liked a little better. 

 

 

 

 

 

Making those pillows and seeing them transform our room along with the other improvements encouraged me to sew more in the new year. The 580 should be smoking by now with the sudden workout but it stays solid and content as usual. In fact I have already tackled six new pillows for our bedroom! but more on this later perhaps... we might be moving the walls in this area and dust will ensue!