BOO!!

In keeping with the idea of quick and easy, one of the items on my Halloween pillow list was the word Boo. It is most definitely iconic! You see it everywhere when the creepy season begins…..on T-shirts, on treat bags, on paper towels. So why not create a pillow with it? Plus, I like the word and figured it would be fun to do.

When Shawn and I were talking about the list in that Starbucks café, he asked what I thought about making the word out of candy corn. He sketched it out, but I wasn’t crazy about how the “B” looked. I didn’t think it would convey the letter enough and was afraid people would struggle with what the pillow was supposed to represent. So, I changed it to having a normal “B” and the two “O”s would be the candy corn. Plus, I thought it would make those candy corn “O”s stand out more.

I sketched the “B” and the candy corn pretty quickly at work one day. So quickly in fact, that it made me apprehensive that they weren’t very good since I hadn’t spent any time refining them. That thought messed with my mind enough that I actually ended up changing what I had a bit!! : ) It worked out better though because I ended up with a “B” which had a little more personality than what I originally drew. I made the bottom loop a little bigger and coming out at an angle so it would kind of point to the “O”s. I did the same for the cut out part of the bottom loop to maintain that aesthetic. After a quick call to Shawn, I also ended up making the candy corn pattern a little more rounded to be sure they were less like the sweet treat and more representational of a letter. As I was looking at the final results, I thought it would make a nice touch if one of the “O”s was regular candy corn and the other was Indian corn. I cut the two patterns out at work to see if I had enough room in the sketch book to do the pillow pattern. Unfortunately, the “B” and the candy corn were a bit too big so we would need to get larger paper.

On the way to work one morning, Shawn and I talked about what colors to make the “B” and the pillow. We decided black would be best for the pillow and white would be a good match for the “B”, since it would be a stark contrast against the pillow and it would pick up a color in the candy corn. After work, we went to JoAnn’s for the fabric that I would need in order to begin. We figured it would be cheaper to do the scenes in felt rather than get fleece for everything, so we started looking around the store to see if we could get all that I needed there. We did indeed find the rectangular pieces of felt that I had used for my demonals and demon hearts, so we picked up what I required for this first pillow as well as ones for some of the others. We also got a couple sheets of larger paper, so we were able to one-stop shop!!

Shawn had suggested that I make the candy corns crooked so it would better give the impression of an “O”. It also made it more fun-looking that way! I planned to trace around the BOO so the pillow would kind of look like the word too. Not only would it make the shape of the pillow more interesting, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to hedge my bets and really drive home what this was supposed to be.

So, now I had my pillow pattern and my letter patterns. Rather than cutting the candy corn into its three sections, I just drew them on the pattern itself, pinned it to the felt, and cut along each line. (I found out afterward that it would have been a little easier when sewing the pieces to each other if I had cut each one bigger than the pattern dictated.) Once I did this, I used the felt as a pattern for the second “O”. After that, I sewed the pieces together and now I had all my letters.

It was at this point that I really screwed up. I went straight to the pillow and sewed the two fabric pieces together. I didn’t realize my mistake until I was through and found I hadn’t sewn the letters on first! I had two options now: try to sew them on through the small hole I had left for stuffing or undo some of my stitches so I could sew the letters on without struggling to do so. I chose the second option, so immediately went to work on removing some of what I had just done. So very frustrating!!! I’m going to need to use a checklist from now on to make sure I do things in the right order.

Once I had the stitches removed, I was able to sew the “B” and the candy corns on pretty smoothly. I finished up the pillow, stuffed it and then stitched up the hole I had left. My first Halloween pillow was complete! I showed it to Shawn and he liked it, but I could only see the puckering where I sewed the pillow on the outside to close the hole. I haven’t quite got the hang of that part yet. I also made the mistake of picking the top of the pillow as the place to stuff it rather than the bottom. It’s more noticeable that way, unfortunately.

So, as much as I do like the pillow…..the great colors, its simplicity, the fun shape of the candy corn……it’s a little bittersweet. But, everything is a learning experience and I need to not see it as a flaw but as a means to grow. Besides, if I don’t look at that one negative aspect, it’s a pretty cool pillow!