This week was my first time sewing by hand! I chose the beginner level project, which was to sew a small heart pillow. I began by cutting a heart stencil out of paper, and used this to create two heart cuts out of fabric for the pillow. Since most people were using the whip stitch for their heart, I was curious to see how mine would come out using a running stitch. The running stitch was predictably a little worse to use and I do slightly regret opting for it. Once I turned the heart inside out to hide the seams and sewed up the hole I used for stuffing, it was painfully obvious where I closed up the gap. Additionally, there were a few obvious gaps from using the running stitch on the pillow which came out pretty ugly.
My workspace; nice and clean before beginning my project.
To make the pillow more aesthetically pleasing, I decided to challenge myself more by embroidering the edge with a whip stitch, essentially hiding my previous mistakes. However, I wished I had practiced with embroidery a little more, as the larger needle proved to handle much different than the smaller one. There were a few stitches where I accidentally threaded the needle through diagonally which made an uneven, ugly stitch that I could not reverse. Regardless of these shortcomings, I continued embroidering to the best of my ability around the edge of the heart, and I’m pretty happy with how the latter half of the embroidery came out, especially for my first time! I even debated crafting a new one to show off my skill improvement, but decided against it to avoid wasting more resources. Overall this was a great experience, and it taught me alot about the importance of thorough and careful planning before beginning a project. In future projects, I will think through my entire fabrication process to avoid hiccups such as my running stitch incident!
The final product, my very own unique heart pillow! You won’t find another like this in the whole OEDK!
Cost Breakdown:
Raw Materials:
- Fabric – 12×6 in square of fabric, approximately $0.50
- Thread – 20 in of thread, 20 in of embroidery thread $0.50
- Stuffing – approximately 12×12 in square of felt $1
Labor Cost:
As an OEDK lab assistant, I make $10/hr. However I do not believe my work was very valuable this time around, so I’ll estimate my labor cost to be minimum wage, so $7.25/hr. I spent about 2 hours in the OEDK creating my heart pillow, which brings the total labor cost to $14.50
Tools:
The following tools were used in this project, however I consider the cost of tools to be negligible because they are OEDK owned and are used by many.
- Sewing Needles
- Pins
- Scissors
My workstation; all cleaned up after I finished
This brings the total cost to approximatley $16.50! If I were selling my heart, I don’t think I would make profit off of this. I could probably get someone to buy it for $6-7 though, which would bring the total net cost to under $10, which is a steal for all the valuable information I gained in this exercise.
