hey everyone welcome to the Hobby Lobby creative studio I'm Sara today I will be your hand stitching guide as we take a look at the whip stitch this handy stitch can easily help you create some very cute accent pillows of your very own so we'll get to stitch in right after this you a whipstitch is a stitch that has to be done by hand but is incredibly easy to do with just a little bit of practice so a whip stitch can be used to add a decorative edge to your fabric or it can be used to bind two pieces of fabric together so today I'm going to show you how to close the open edges of a pillow that you've just stuffed with a whip stitch now today I'm going to be using fiberfill to stuff my pillow with but you could just as easily use the whip stitch method after you're putting an actual insert into your pillow cover so I'm going to take you through the process of actually how to make the pillow first up until the spot where we need our whip stitch so to get started with our pillow we first need to cut to 15 by 15 inch squares of fabric now actually my completed pillow size is going to be 14 inches by 14 inches but I'm cutting 15 inches because I need to allow for 1/2 inch seams on each side of my fabric here now ideally when you're doing a whip stitch what you want to do first is actually so most of the sides with your sewing machine and all your corners so what you want to do is leave a little open edge along the bottom of your fabric to put your whip stitch after you've finished stuffing your pillow so here's one that I already have a little bit further along I've already sewn my half inch seam all the way around now let me tell you where to sew so this is the bottom edge here so this is where our whip stitch is going to be eventually so what I would do is start just off-center maybe an inch or two off Center start your seam here and be sure to do a little back stitch and then follow this bottom edge go into the corner and go all the way around your entire pillow at half an inch all the way around now when you get back to the bottom edge here you're going to stop just off-center to the left now so basically what you're doing is leaving maybe four or five or six inches here just enough room to get your hand through to be able to stuff the pillow so once you've done this you're ready to turn your pillow inside out now when you're turning your pillow inside out you want to make sure that before you start stuffing that all of your corners are poked out far enough and that they look really nice and crisp so actually in the bag of fiberfill that I'm going to be using today it comes with this little blunt wooden stick and this is really a helpful tool to help me poke out those corners so once you get all your corners poked out think of about good here so now you're ready to stuff your pillow but before we do that we need to give the opened edge where our whip stitch is going to go a quick press now I've already done this earlier so all you do is fold in your open edges here and just make sure that they line up with the seams that you've already made on the sides so once everything is nice and even all the way across just give that a nice press with your iron and you're good to go at that point so now we can start stuffing our pillow and I'm going to be using some fiberfill and fiberfill just works a lot better if you can tear it up a little bit like this and just break it down and get some of the lumps out of it before you stuff it into your pillow so when you're stuffing just make sure that you stuff your corners really well so I might stuff those first and then just remember to keep tearing this fiberfill down and break it down a little bit before you stuff it and that'll give your pillow a really nice smooth look whenever it's completely stuffed okay so whenever you're done stuffing you'll have a nice pretty pillow that looks like this so here's one that we've already got all the way stuffed and it's almost ready to be whip stitched so the last little bit of prep that we need to do for our whip stitch is to pin our folded edges closed which I've already done here so the little tip there is to put your pins horizontally to your seams and to put them a little bit down from the edge so that they don't quite get in the way whenever you're doing your whip stitch which is going to be going right along the top edge here so you don't have to pin this close but it's really a good idea so that way you're not worried about trying to hold this together and making it even as you do your whip stitch that way you can just concentrate on your whip stitch all right so now we're ready to stitch the whip stitch on to our edges it really doesn't matter what size sewing needle that you use to do your stitch so just grab a small one that's handy out of your sewing basket and I'm going to be using some all-purpose thread in a contrasting color so that you can really see the stitches that I'm making but of course typically you would pick a thread color that matches the pillow that you're working on so what I've done to thread my needle is to put your thread through the eye and then make your strands even with each other and line up your ends so that they're the same length and then tie a single knot through both ends doing this really makes our thread a lot stronger as we're doing our stitch and prevents it from breaking and then the stitch that we end up with on our pillow will just be a lot more secure in the long run doing it this way so now we're ready to do our whip stitch okay so I'm standing my pillow up to where I have the back side of the pillow if they see me and then I have the front side of the pillow facing out now when you do your whip stitch what you're doing is inserting your needle through both layers of fabric each time but for our very first stitch what we want to do is hide the knot at the end of our thread so to do that I'm actually going to go in between the two folds of our fabric here at the very end of where our opening starts and then I'm also gonna get as close to the edge as I can get with my needle without actually being on the edge so insert your needle in between those two folds of fabric and pull it out the other side and now see our knot will be nice and hidden in between these two folds instead of being visible on the outside here so now I can bring the thread back towards me and then now I'm going to insert my needle through both layers of fabric and I want to be consistent in how far down from the top edge I am and I want to do it in the same spot as I did my first stitch and that's true going all the way across the edge of this pillow so each time you do a stitch you want to do it pretty close to the stitch right before it and just as far down from the edge as you did the stitch before and just as far over so that your spacing is really even or at least as even as possible so make sure the top edge of your pillow here stays folded in so you can just kind of guide it with your fingers and make sure it stays closed so basically what you're trying to achieve here with the whip stitch is really uniform stitching and small stitching all the way across the edge of your pillow and this is the bottom edge of my pillow so once we turn it right-side up and have it sitting on a chair or a couch or something it's really not going to be that noticeable it's not an invisible stitch but if you do everything neat and tidy enough you'll hardly even notice it so the whip stitch is a great option for quickly sewing those edges shut so now I've stitched all the way across my edge and I'm ready to tie my thread off what you can do is insert your needle just as if you were about to do a whip stitch and then before you close this loop completely put your needle through that loop and then close it and then go ahead and do one more right next to it so put your needle through again like you're about to do a whip stitch and then loop your needle through that loop that's forming and then pull it tight now instead of cutting your thread off here what you can do is reinsert your needle right between the two folds of the fabric and then poke your needle out about a quarter of an inch or a half an inch down from the edge on the backside of the pillow and then snip it off here because what that does is now the threads going to retract back up into the pillow and be hidden and we don't have to worry about cutting our thread off too close to the knot and possibly cutting or not and there you have it easy right well thanks for joining me today everybody give this stitch a try it's quick simple and you'll have lots of cute new accent pillows to show for it see you next time five you