We recently gave our lounge room a huge overhaul and the couch was in desperate need of some comfy cushions. I had a colour scheme in mind and wanted something quirky that would give the couch a lift. I looked high and low but couldn’t find anything that I loved. There was one thing for it….I had to make my own! I was given a cat shaped cushion/door draft stopper as a housewarming gift, we called him Stretch, he was definitely worse for wear. I decided to make cat cushions to replace him. After all, I am a crazy cat lady and everyone should know as soon as they walk in my door, right?

Cushion covers seemed easy enough but it always helps to check your thinking. I used this tutorial to make my basic cushions . Both the basic cushions have the olive green fabric on one side and the pink fabric on the other. That way I can arrange them with both pink sides showing or both olive sides showing or one of each. I think it adds flexibility plus I only realized I didn’t have enough olive fabric at the last minute! Luckily it was a quilting cotton and I also had the pink fabric from the same collection. Necessity being the mother of invention and all that….

But back to Cat Cushions. This was my first time using piping or appliqué and also making a concealed zipper flap at the back. I love how they turned out! Piping looks so professional and sweet, I could add it to everything! Get the piping tutorial here. The zipper flap makes the cushions reversible and also stops the zipper pull from digging into you while you’re curled up on the couch! If you want to add a zipper flap, this tutorial tells you what you need to know.

I chose not to use a satin stitch on the appliqué because I didn’t want a defined border and I wanted my beginner mistakes to be less obvious! I set my machine to a small zig zag (0.8 long and 3 wide on my machine) and practiced on scraps. My aim was to have most of the stitch on the cat and just fall off the edge on to the main fabric. I bought my cat template from Kip and Fig on Etsy , the big cat is the whole template and the smaller pillow just has part of the cat. If you want to give appliqué a try, check out this tutorial . Just as a note, you will need some sort of iron on interfacing that is sticky on both sides. It will have paper attached to one side (you trace your image on to that side), cut it out roughly and iron that to the back of your fabric (blue drops fabric in my case), cut out the image properly, peel away the paper and iron it on to the base fabric. In Australia, it seems to be called Vliesofix or Bondaweb. Just make sure you get the right type of thing!

If you fancy replicating my arrangement, the large cat pillow is a European bed pillow (58cm X 58cm), the olive/pink ones are 50cm X 50cm and the small cat pillow is 40cm X 40cm. I cut the fronts and backs to the same size as the actual pillow and used a 1/4 inch seam allowance. I didn’t make the backs of the cat pillows any bigger than the front as I figured the width of the zipper would make up for the extra seam allowance for the zipper flap. That way the cushions are nice and poofy. All my fabrics were quilting cottons, except for the mustard fabric on the cat cushions, which is a fashion cotton sateen with a touch of stretch. I used a ballpoint needle when sewing those ones as they show needle marks like crazy!