For the Love of Monogramming

….not to be confused with the similar word, mammogramming, because I don’t think I will love those when the time comes.  I know how that could be confusing.

So, yesterday I rattled away about how I am not a sewer and how sewing seems to be my perfectionism-nemesis, but how I am ready to take the sewing battle head on and fight for my life.  Well, I wasn’t quite so dramatic, but this is a dramatic topic for me, so bear with me.

This weekend, I was determined to conquer the fear  head on by attempting something I’ve wanted to do for a long time but haven’t gotten around to it.  I was determined to make a pillow cover.  Pretty simple, right?  Definitely, if you know what you are doing, which I don’t.  However, I had the hardest time finding affordable fabric in patterns I liked and wanted for the living room or bedroom, so I looked for something a little different that I could do.

That’s when I found the awesome inspiration from How Does She?'s monogram pillow.  She made a super cute pillow out of white fabric and blue felt with the letter “b” on it.

For us, our monogram is pretty awesome.  Every name, besides my middle name, begins with “s”.  San and Sarah and an s-beginning last name.  So a monogram for us would be sSs.  It looks kind of funny, but pretty cool.  We love the fact that our names begin with the same letter and now we can name all twenty two of our kids s-names.  Okay, so we will not be having twenty two children (although some days some little cutie will make me want a whole clan) and we will not be naming them all s-names because that kind of drives us bonkers.  It’s just not our thang, you know? 

Anyway, we love the letter S in all its curvaceousness.  I really love that my new name is SAS, and I believe I fully take advantage of representing the name well in our marriage.  So, we like finding little S pieces of art or nick nacks here and there.  I thought an S pillow would be a perfect addition to our living room since that is the heart of our little world together.

This is what I started with:



We don’t really have a color scheme figured out in the living room right now, but we know we wants pops of bright, happy colors.  Mr. Converse Sneakers loves the color orange, and since it is almost autumn, orange is looking more appealing to me every day, so we went for a light orange felt to pop against the white fabric.
I wish I knew that Ikea sells pillow inserts really cheap (well I suppose I did but didn’t even think about buying them there at the time), so I paid $12 for a 16x16 store-brand insert that seemed to defeat the purpose of making it myself, since part of why I was doing it was to save money.  Now I know for next time.



The most time-consuming part of this whole project was cutting out the letter.  I wanted the S to take up most of the pillow, and since our printer won’t print letters bigger than the standard 8.5”x11” paper (at least I don’t think it will), I had to print a letter I liked and then freehand it in a bigger size.  It definitely was not perfect, but good enough for me!



It was the perfect size for the pillow!

 

Next, I just did as the tutorial said by cutting it out and using my sewing machine to slowly stitch around the letter.  Let’s just say it is far from perfect, but I am so proud that I got around the whole thing without having to start again and my start/stop stitches are barely noticeable, which is a huge triumph since they usually look ridiculously clumped up and just wonky.  The rest of the pillow-making was very easy and rewarding.

Here it is in all its orange and white glory!





It’s a little ray of sunshine in our dark windowless living room.  I am ecstatic with how it looks with the blue we already have in the room, which we are adding a lot more of in the gallery wall I said I was done with for a while but have been working hard to change up.  I hope to reveal it later this week.

So, what do you think?  Where do you incorporate your favorite letter into your home?