Christmas 2017 Gifts Four and Five: Pillow Shams

 Yup, MORE pillow shams are on the gift list!  Pillow shams are strong this holiday season *laugh*.

These first two pillowcases might seem familiar to some as you have seen them before.  These were from a kit that I was given and I thought I'd send them to my family back East when they were done.  And they are done!  I'll have to wait to ship them off until after Christmas, since I still have some other things to make and such (which the family back East is okay with), but yay for getting these done.

Since you've already seen the one pillowcase done and the other one looks like the first one, I figured I'd throw in another gift I made this week.  This one for my son.  Ready for it?  It's ANOTHER pillowcase!  *Laugh*, I figured since I made the daughter her pillowcase with an "A" on it for her name last year that I would make Alvah one this year, but more geared toward a boy.

Please excuse the wrinkles, the pic was taken straight out of the dryer.

I used a light green flannel pillowcase (it comes out really dark looking in the pictures,but is actually pretty light) as it SHOULD match my son's favorite flannel sheet (I got it on LL Bean's website about three years ago in the middle of summer CHEAP and got one for both kids.  The son definitely likes them better than the daughter does, though) and I put a fancy "A" on it along with an embroidery border that I got inspired by on Pinterest as I was scrawling through my embroidery board :).

The coolest little hidden thing I did on the embroidery for the son, since he LOVES texture variances, was to use different thicknesses of embroidery floss on the project, put french knots in different places and I even went through and put back stitch over stem stitch in a few places to make the embroidery bumpy and things.  It's got a cool texture to it when you run your hand over it, but I made sure to stick it close to the edge of the pillow case so that it won't bother his face at night when sleeping.

I thought it came out really well, especially considering that I nearly flunked "script/font" in my art classes when I was younger (handwriting...it just isn't my forte).  I have to say I LOVE Pinterest for these types of things.  I can pull up a picture of a letter and just stare at it on my Kindle until I get it right on the project I'm doing.  It's a valuable resource in that way!

Total Time to Make Gifts:  The kit pillow shams....I really don't know.  I worked on them when my son was in speech therapy for the most part.  I'll go for 8 hours a piece as I think that's a fair estimate.  They were surprisingly time consuming.

The pillowcase for the son went really quick and I had it done in about two hours.  I love it when that happens!

Total Cost to Make Gifts:  Nothing.  The pillow cases were either gifted to me (in the case of the kit ones) or I had on hand and the embroidery floss was gifted to me by my step mom.