I recently discovered inexpensive drop cloths in the paint department of Wal-Mart. They cost a whoppin' $8.97 and you get 9'x6' with every side hemmed. That's a lot of fabric and the best part is it looks like linen or hopsacking...nubby and textured in a natural, neutral color. I've made a ton of pillows and several table runners from one package.
The first thing you have to do is find pillow forms and cut the drop cloth the same shape plus two inches. So if your pillow form is 12"x12", you cut a square 14"x14" for the front and then cut two pieces of the hemmed edge 14"x8.5" for the back. Then match the right sides together, overlapping the back two pieces so that when it's sewn together, you can easily slip the pillow form in. Or you could just cut two 14"x14" pieces for the front and the back, sew all sides together leaving 6 inches, turn it right side out, cram the form inside the 6 inch slit, and then handstitch the opening. But I'm always looking for a quick shortcut, so I prefer to not handstitch.
Before I sew anything together, I iron a design on the front square. I'm going to include some copyright-free designs I copied from an art book I have, so feel free to save them and use them. I use Avery's t-shirt transfer sheets and they easily print on my inkjet printer.
Here are a few pictures of my pillows and table runner. I traced around a dinner plate to pencil the sewing line for the rounded ends on the table runner, but you can design the ends any way you like. Experiment with this idea and see just how much time you piddle away!
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