A couple of weeks ago I worked through what kind of bolster I wanted to make for Em’s room.  I have had fabric for longer than I care to admit for this project.  Over the weekend, I finally decided get it done.  I want to be the first to admit…this is far from perfect…but I am happy with the way it turned out.

I started with a remnant of fabulous fabric…I believe it was $3.50 for the whole piece.  I was going to make a “tube”, so I estimated how big around the tube needed to be and folded the uneven edges and pressed it.  I got out my roll of upholstery zipper, this stuff is awesome, but be careful not to unzip it…or zip the pull all the way off…trust me).  I chose my zipper length & cut it and pinned the zipper to one of the folded edges.

I loved this fabric for having built-in guides! It was really helpful with folding and pinning.

Hi VooDoo!  He’s my pincushion :).   I am no seamstress, this did not end pretty…had to improvise.

I ran back and forth over either end of the zipper to make ‘stops’, then I did it again over the fininshed area, as you see above.  On to the cording.  Making custom cording is super easy…all you really need is a strip of fabric and the cotton cording, fold the fabric & using your zipper foot (so you can get super close to the cording) sew as close as you can to the now hidden cording.

I always try to over estimate, but of course I was just a bit under the amount I needed by like an inch :(…I improvised & left a small area on the finished end without cording…not very noticable.  I looked around the house for a template for my round ends…

Perfect!  The trickiest and most tedious part of this project was finishing the ends.  I turned the cover wrong side out, and folded the end over the amount I needed…then I started by pinning the cording…all raw edges should point the same direction.

Also, you don’t want to pin through (or sew through) both layers of the main cover…just the layer that is folded over.  Once the cording was pinned, I went back and added the round end piece…wrong side out.  Sewing this was tricky, after I was done, I trimmed the excess fabric off.

Here is a finished end…again, not perfect…

To get the ends of the cording to overlap, you have to pin them with the ends pointing down toward the raw edges.

I stuffed a body pillow in and zipped her up!

See how the ends aren’t perfectly stuffed?  Well, I over estimated the amount I needed when I finished the second end…rather than redoing that, I chose to improvise (kinda my M.O.)…I found some foam pieces cluttering up in my soon-to-be-craft area (fingers crossed) and cut them to the size I needed (see my template?) and stuffed the ends.

So there you have it folks…a super inexpensive bolster that is the width of Princess Pete’s bed…just what I envisioned :). 

Today’s secret revealed…using the body pillow ($9) saved big bucks compared to an actual bolster insert ($30-40 for this size).  I’m sure eventually I will shorten up one of those ends…probably the one that was short the cording…two birds with one stone ;).

 

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