My Daughter's First Sewing Project

The Project Challenge:
Create a set of matching pillowcases for our front porch chairs.

Here we have two mismatched useless pillows.

Material on hand: an old full size bed skirt that once belonged to my son.

Learning sewing machine basics.
To begin with, I taught my daughter how to thread our sewing machine.

I also showed her how to thread and use the bobbin.

I went over the basics of setting tension levels and stitch length.

Cutting off the elastic of the bed skirt.

More trimming.

Practice sewing on scraps.

Pinning two pieces of the bed skirt together to make a wider piece.

All nicely stitched together and ready to sew into a pillow case.

The first pillowcase is ready. The pillow fit well after a few adjustments and the bottom opening was sewed together. Beautiful!

The next day: Repeating the same steps to complete the second pillowcase.

Sewing up the pinned sides.

The completed pillows on our front porch. Don't they look wonderful?!

I blogged last week that I would be helping my daughter to start her first basic sewing project.

I had several goals in mind that I wanted accomplished with her first project. My goals were as follows:

1. A fun and relatively simple project. Nothing frustrating or too hard.
2. A project that would be a motivation to start other projects.
   
3. A project that would use materials I already had on hand.
   
4. A project that would be useful. No useless projects.
   

I'm proud to say that she did a wonderful job with her first project and all my project goals were fulfilled! It took her two days to complete the project working about one hour and a half a day. Our "new" pillows look great on our front porch chairs!

We will start a second sewing project on Friday. Can't wait!