I actually finished something!!

Aaah...it feels so good to actually have a finish to brag about!!!  And by brag I mean that I actually finished something and not that it is so great.  Let's just clarify that right off the bat....  ;)

I mentioned last week that I was designing and making a big doggy pillow for our sweet girl, Belle.  Well, as I have also mentioned MANY times in the past, I am very aware that one of my strengths in life is not spatial reasoning or designing how something comes together.  I just don't see it.  Now, following a pattern I can usually do--but making up my own, not so much.

BUT, I persevered and DIY'ed this baby up!  But let's back up.  Last week, I left you with this:



Since then, I sewed all of those squares into 8" blocks (finished size) leaving me with 15 total including the 10 I already had.  I knew I wanted this pillow to be roughly 3 feet by 4 feet since Belle is a big dog so I decided on a 2-foot wide section of patchwork along the top.  But I didn't want to put anything together until I got the foam insert.

And while I was in the big city shopping with my sister, inspiration struck--instead of buying that EXPENSIVE foam, I could use cheap pillows from JC Penney!  I bought 3 king-sized "firm for side sleepers" pillows and hand-stitched them together when I got home.  So I got the comfort of a soft pillow with some firmness to make it easier to get up and down for Belle.  Then I took an old mattress cover we had with a plastic lining (since she has incontinence issues...) and covered all 3 pillows with it.  I just handstitched this along the bottom to keep it in place.  Sorry, I forgot to take a picture...

The 3 pillows together ended up measuring in at 32" x 48" which was perfect because I could use my 8" squares without any modification.  So--I sewed the squares into 4 rows of 3 squares each.  That made a patchwork column of 24" x 32".  So I sewed a 12" rectangle to either side and I had my top done.  Then I made a zipper strip to act as the side of the pillow.  The biggest zipper I could get at Walmart yesterday was 30" which made for some interesting times getting the finished product around these pillows but I said a bad word and threw it at the wall persevered.

Since I had 3 patchwork squares left over and some black strips left over from the top, I used these randomly to make the side strip long enough.  Once I got that baby sewn to the top, I realized I was out of black fabric...

But I wasn't going to give up this close to victory so I dug around in my stash for something ugly enough I didn't mind losing it to the bottom of a doggy bed and came up with a big piece of mottled lime green fabric that I think may have once been curtains in my sister's old classroom..  Anyway, it was the perfect size for what I needed and I quickly pinned and it sewed it together.

Now...as I mentioned before, I'm not the best at designing.  Somewhere along the way my math got a little hazy and the side strip ended up WAY too big for the bottom piece and I had to add some creative folds and tucks (i.e. cramming the fabric neatly into the necessary space) along the back where I figured no one would notice.   And you can see that it doesn't fit exactly snug around the edges of the pillow form, but I'm down with that.  It is for a dog after all!

But, Belle doesn't seem to mind.  She was so funny when Chris called her over to the pillow and told her to lay down because she didn't seem to want to get on it and mess it up.  She kinda put her front paws on it and left her back end hanging off the side.  Well, her back end (and the incontinence) is the whole reason we want her to have a special place to lay, so we had to convince her to get all the way on.  But, once she got the hang of it, she looked pretty comfortable... what do you think?

Oh, on a side note--I sprayed both the inner pillow section and the outer cover repeatedly with ScotchGuard for fabric in hopes of keeping the pee that she will drip out of the pillows.  I am hopeful that this along with regular washing of the outer layer will prevent any pee and dirt from creeping into the pillows and stinking them up.

Belle says "How can you not love this face???"