Chevron Pillow and Olivia Nursery Update

You know I've been loving on Chevron for a while now.  And you know I've been working on planning Olivia's nursery for a while now.  And so, I thought I should just kill two birds with one stone, and make something Chevron for the Nursery!  One of my favorite design bloggers, Tiffany @ Living Savvy, did a review of her 2011 projects and of course the chevron pillow jumped out at me!  Tiffany actually has a LOT of awesome pillow ideas, if you need one or twenty! 

So I headed off one night after O was in bed, JoAnn 40 % off coupon in hand and picked out this fun stripe:

Source: joann.com via Kimberly on Pinterest

I love how it compliments the Aqua bedding I have, but its not too matchy matchy.  Oh and in case you looked back on my nursery post, I have decided to go with an aqua and brown color scheme, instead of the pink and yellow.  Once I started getting stuff in her room, it just sort of went that way.  It happens sometimes.


Anyway, back to my pillow.  My fabric has nine stripes before it starts over and so I had to draw nine stripes on a piece of paper.  My brain just could not figure out how this was going to work with out something in my hand to move around.  I 'cut' it on the bias and it didn't take me long to see that those two pieces were never going to make a chevron pattern, so I 'cut' one of those pieces on the bias going the other way. . .

. . . and figured out how to match those up.

So I cut half of the fabric into 6 inch strips going one way, and the other half of the fabric into 6 inch strips going the other way. 

Then I matched them up to create the chevron pattern.  I do not know a better way to do this than what I did.  I don't know a better way because I'm not a freaking mathematician, which is what it would probably take to figure out a formula for making a chevron pattern out of a nine stripe fabric.  So by the time I matched the stripes, there was a little bit  of waste, and I could just barely make my fabric square 19" long.  It was 21" wide, so I cut off 1" from each side to make it an even square. 

My first try at sewing the stripes together did not go well.  I had to unpick them.  Because the bias of a fabric is really stretchy, I found the best solution to be carefully matching and pinning each stripe.  I also did a stay stitch (with bias use a large basting stitch) to keep the bias from stretching, which didn't seem to make that big of a difference to me. . .

I like to make my pillows with a flapped closure on the back so I can change them with out ruining the pillow (and with out adding a zipper.  I struggle with zippers.)  I decided to check my fabric stash and sure enough there was a drop cloth I had used for a tree skirt back in November that was perfect for the back of my pillow.  I used a scrap of the stripe cut on the bias to sew a binding on the edge of the flap opening for a little added interest.  (sorry, no picture right now)

And since this pillow was made for Olivia's Nursery, I threw Baby Bear into the mix.  I think it turned out great!!

 And Olivia doesn't like it when a camera and Baby Bear get together with out her, so she had to jump in and get in on the action.  Check out the best pictures here.

Thanks Tiffany for the inspiration!!