Lost Arts of Sewing: Vintage Style Embroidered Pillowcase by A Jennuine Life

Welcome folks!  I’m kicking off the series today with my version of a project that started this whole idea whirring in my head:

Here goes my take on Grannies’ vintage style embroidered pillowcase:

I have two pillowcases from Grannie in this style and I use them for Arden’s bed.  Even though they’re vintage, I would rather use them and risk stains than have them sit untouched and pristine in my linen closet.

I began by inspecting the pillowcases from Grannie.  I can see that she used pearl cotton instead of multi-strand divisible embroidery floss.  The pattern is worked on the surface of the pillowcase, using two parallel lines of machine stitching in a manner I find similar to couching, only sort of reversed as in couching you lay a yarn on top of the work and tack it in place with small stitches through the piece.

I pulled out a plain white pillowcase and ran an additional line of stitching parallel to the factory stitches.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to match the stitch length since I did this in a hurry, and my line has much shorter stitches than the other.  This might have worked to my advantage as I very likely wouldn’t have been able to match exactly and keep them in sync, so this way I could choose from among which stitches to pick for one side to best match the other.

From there it was a simple matter of working a zig-zagging stitch with each point bridging two machine stitches.  I tried my best to keep the stitches even and they’re not, but isn’t that part of the charm of handwork?  After once around the case, I ran a second zig-zag intersecting the first creating the x-stitch pattern from my Grannie’s pillowcase.

All done!  Not too shabby from this angle.  This did not take that much time to complete – maybe three hours’ work in total.

I think mine will get knitted together more like Grannie’s after a couple of trips through the washer and dryer.  Now I’m off to embellish some more pillowcases or even a skirt hem or two – won’t you give it a try?