Spring Pillow with Sin City Stamps and Altered Pages

Karen here with another project combining digital images with rubber stamping.

For my spring pillow, I used a leaf image from Terri Sproul's Leaves by Sin City Stamps and
a bird image from the Little Spring Birdies collage sheet by Altered Pages.

I had originally intended to use Terri Sproul’s Leaves for fall projects, but there are all kinds of leaves in the set and several are just right for adding to flowers.  You can buy Sin City Stamps individually, but buying the set gives you so many options!  Even if you only buy a couple of sets, you instantly have a library of images to draw from when you set out to make something.

Supplies
muslin
printed fabric
freezer paper
thread
fiberfill
buttons for yoyo flowers
ColorBox Chalk Ink in Olive Pastel

I printed the Little Spring Birdies collage sheet onto a piece of muslin with an Inkjet printer.   You just need to cut a piece of freezer paper and a piece of the fabric to the same size (in this case 8.5 by 11 inches), put the wrong side of the fabric onto the shiny side of the printer paper and iron until they stick together.  My printer does not like anything thicker than regular paper, and it smeared black ink on some of the images, but most of them were okay.



I have a bunch of fabric charm packs (5 x 5 inches) and decided to see which colors in the charm packs looked good with colors in the collage sheet.  Many fabric companies are now offering collections of small cuts.  It’s a great way to get a little bit of lots of different fabrics.  I noticed one of the collections had a red-pink color that was almost exactly the same as the red-pink of one of the birds, so I decided to work with that collection. I chose some prints for a border, cut the charms in half and sewed them together in a strip.  Then I cut the strip in half with a rotary cutter so that I had two strips.


I cut out the bird image, stitched it onto one of the charm squares and then stitched the square onto a piece of tea dyed muslin.  I used a zigzag stitch.

Then I figured out where I wanted my flowers and stamped the leaves with ColorBox Chalk Ink in Olive Pastel.  I used really tightly woven muslin.  For some help with stamping on fabric, see this post.


Here is a tip. I use a transparent ruler to help me with image placement:



I trimmed the piece of muslin and added my pieced borders.


Then I cut two more pieces of muslin the same size – one for a lining to strengthen the front and one for the back.  I pinned the muslin pieces together, leaving an opening for turning and stuffing, stitched the seam, trimmed the corners, turned the piece right side out, and ironed it.


Then I stuffed it with fiberfill and stitched the opening closed.

I cut circles from two more charms and made them into yoyos.  Then I attached the yoyos with vintage buttons.  The leaves make the yoyos look like flowers.



Done!