Baby DIY: sewing a cushion cover

Sewing is proving to be a great distraction and good use of my time in these last days before our baby joins us. Yesterday I whipped up seven new cushion covers for our sofas, and today I made a little one for the baby's room. The main panel of fabric on the cushion is from the Children at Play fabric line designed by Sarah Jane, who makes the most beautiful fabrics from her illustrations of childhood. I edged the panel of Children at Play fabric with a selection of six different fabrics from my stash.

The length of my cushion was 48cm, so I cut down the panel of Sarah Jane fabric to measure 34cm, which gave me the measurements for the rectangular panels that would go at the top and bottom of the cushion. I decided to use 6 different fabrics for the panels, so each rectanglular panel measured 9cm long x 7cm tall before sewing. In hindsight, I should have cut off more of the white space from the main panel, and used bigger rectangles of my other six fabrics to make more of a feature of them.

After stitching together each of the rectangular panels, I then stitched them onto the top and bottom of the main panel of fabric. I wanted this to be a envelope cushion to save making a trip out to buy a zip, so for the back, I cut two panels of fabric with a total length that was 16cm longer than the length of the cushion to allow for the envelope overlap. 

I then hemmed one side of each of the back panels, before placing them right sides down on top of the Children at Play fabric, ready to sew them all together. For the back panels, I used the same fabric that I used on the reverse of the baby quilt I made at the beginning of last week, as I had some leftover.

Where it's possible to avoid using pins, I tend to do so to save time, so the only point in sewing this cushion that I used pins was to pin the three layers of fabric together at the overlap / closure on the reverse side of the cushion so they wouldn't slide out of place when sewing the three fabrics together to complete the cushion.

Once I had sewn along all of the edges, I snipped the corners off to give a neater finish once the cushion cover was turned the right way out. I remember my Mum teaching me this sewing tip when I was a teenager,  but what I didn't gather in her explanation was that you must not snip through any of your stitches, otherwise you just end up with holes where the corners should be. Funnily enough, I learnt the hard way about that one. Feel free to question my common sense!