Sophia’s Reading Pillow
A special little girl has a birthday tomorrow. My great-niece Sophia will be 3-years-old. She loves Minnie Mouse!
I got the idea of this reading pillow from a friend on FaceBook. Luckily I found Minnie Mouse fabric coordinates, one at JoAnn Fabrics and the other from eBay. I always prewash and dry my fabric just in case there is fading. Also for the reason that I don’t like my fabrics to shrink after quilting. I cut my fabric a little larger than I needed to allow for the shrinkage the quilting produces. I quilted all the pieces of fabric and used Soft and Stable in the quilt sandwich. I don’t like floppy pillows so I thought that would be a good idea. However, it made the pillow a little firmer than I would like. Therefore, I didn’t make my pillow form as firm as I would have. I make my own pillow forms using glazed batting that is about an inch thick. This is the sort of polyester batting a professional upholster would use. I use muslin or whatever I have on hand for the pillow form. I put two pieces of the glazed batting into the form and make sure it is nice and smooth and pokes out well into the corners. I then use scraps of polyester batting to fill in between the 2 full pieces of batting. This way you get a smooth pillow with no lumps. If I am using a non-quilted fabric for my outer pillow, I use 4 full pieces of batting with scraps of batting in the middle. I put a zipper in the back to make it easy to remove the pillow form and wash the outer pillow.
Another idea I got from a friend is the way I quilted the fabric. Instead of trying to quilt perfectly straight lines, I used a serpentine stitch. I very lightly marked my quilting lines with my Sewline pencil and centered the line on my presser foot. My Bernina 830 Record has the serpentine stitch built in, but it is tucked away in the closet. I am most fond of my old Singers. So I used my Singer 306 W and the flat cam # 20. I had to experiment with the stitch length. The longer the stitch length, the longer the “waves.” I love quilting fabric this way. It used to drive me crazy when I got off a little with my straight lines. Thank you so much Jeanne!
I tucked a cute Minnie Mouse book into the pocket on the pillow. I hope she enjoys it as much as I did making it.