ruffle | little home by hand

As promised, an easy peasy way to make this elegant little pillow:

Because I am lazy and don’t like hemming and finishing edges I used jersey for this (jersey doesn’t fray and you can get away with not finishing edges!).
You start off with 4 parts: the front (in my case ca. 13.5×13.5in to fit a 14x14in pillow), a long strip of fabric to make the ruffle and 2 back pieces (we are going to make an envelope back). I’m not one for measuring too much, just make sure there is one bigger back piece (lets say about 13.5x10in) and one smaller one (let’s make it about 13.5x6in). We’ll want these 2 pieces to considerably overlap.

Next, we’re going to ruffle the long strip of fabric, by sewing a straight line on either long side of it, using the longest stitch on your machine (you can also do this by hand very quickly by making a rough basting stitch). Don’t backstitch the beginning and end because you will now need to pull the bobbin thread gently on both ends, making the ruffle. Be careful not to pull too hard or the thread will break and you’ll have to start over again. There’s a good tutorial on ruffling on this page (though she uses two rows of gathering stitches and I only do one!)
That’s what we have now:

Next we’ll pin down the ruffle on the top piece where we want it and carefully sew it on the top piece with a straight line of normally sized stitches (if you follow your line of gathering stitches for the ruffle it’ll look like only one row of stitches).

Do this on both sides of the ruffle.

All that remains now is to lay the two back pieces (right sides facing down) on the front piece, making sure they overlap, and pin them in place.

Sew around all four sides of the pillow, clip corners if necessary and turn inside out.
Done!