Unique Pincushions

I found this darling little wrecker-tow truck at an antique shop over the weekend for only six bucks. There’s some mechanism missing, disqualifying it from any serious collector’s purchase, but the second I saw it I thought “pincushion!”If you look hard enough around your house, you’ll find many little unique things just begging to hold your sewing pins. Here are a few other things I found that could each hold a little pillow of fluff & fabric. The shorter the piece better, as when pinning, I find that taller pieces are a bit less ergonomic.

To make the pin pad for my truck, (ONE) I scanned an old ad from a 1954 Farm Journal magazine -the same era as my toy truck. I shrunk it down and printed it out onto the same ink-jet fabric sheet I used to make the luggage labels in the previous post. At this point you may choose to launder the printed fabric to soften it up.(TWO) I cut a stack of felt to the shape of the bed of the truck to help retain the pad’s final shape. (THREE) I then used one of those pieces to gauge the trimming of the fabric pad cover.

(FOUR) I cut out the fabric and rounded the corners, (FIVE) & (SIX)

sewed around the folded edges of the cover and filled with the felt and poly-fill stuffing. (SEVEN) & (EIGHT)Then I gathered the cover around the fill, moving the gathers to the corners and knotting the thread once my pad was to shape. If you’re making a round pad, just even out the gathers or cinch all gathering tight to create a ball.(NINE) Once I was happy with the gathers, I oozed E6000 glue around the inside of the truck bed (careful to avoid any open areas that would cause drips,) and placed the covered pad in place.(TEN)And here’s my finished pincushion!

To see more recent truck pin-cushions, click here!