Naughty Dog!

So one of my sweet coworkers brought me this fiasco the other day:

She bought the pillow at a bargain and wanted to know if it could be mended.  Who did this? 

The culprit:

Who, me?

Meet Allie, the naughty little dog who apparently does not like burlap.  She seems to be denying culpability with that sweet face, doesn't she?

Well, it turns out that I don't like burlap either!  It does not get along well with my sewing machine, so I tackled this problem primarily by hand. 

I started by cutting away the affected portion of the ruffle. 

Another coworker was kind enough to donate some of her burlap ribbon to the cause. I cut a length of the ribbon long enough to replace the section I removed.

It was my intent to salvage the binding as best as I could, because I knew it'd be difficult to match a different fabric.  That's where my trusty seam ripper comes in again:

 

This actually turned out to be quite messy (burlap fibers everywhere!), but was surprisingly quick and easy. 

 

 

I gave the binding a good press with my iron and attached it to the new length of burlap.  It turns out that clips work much better than pins with burlap.

 

 



I had my walking foot on my machine from another project, so I opted to leave it on for this one.  It actually helped a lot, I think.  I had zero problems stitching the binding onto the burlap.

I then fashioned a similar ruffle in the gap on the pillow and used by big Wonder Clips to hold it in place. 

 

It turned out to be super easy and quite fun to stitch it on by hand because of the natural grid burlap has.  It makes me wonder how it would look to be embroidered...

 

 

And here's the end result:

 

 

Not too shabby, huh?  I'd say my first experiment with burlap was a success.  I'd love to hear about any interesting repairs you've had to make!

 

Until next time, God Bless!