Comfy Croissant, Cushion and Throw Blanket

Bonjour!

Ah yes! We're all off to the Olympics in Paris this summer. Well, maybe not you or me but we can certainly be watching it from our sofas as we follow the top athletes from around the world competing in all sorts of weird sports you didn't even know existed. And what says Paris more than a warm buttery croissant? Okay, yes, there's also a nice wine, smelly cheese, maybe even a baguette that's actually fresh and crunchy, but I made this, The Comfy Croissant! Is it a cushion? Is it a blanket? Is it a soft plushie that some grown adults seem to think counts as decor these days? It is all those things in one. You can enjoy watching the Olympics (or whatever else you're into) curled up inside this soft fluffy blanket just watch you don't spill the butter :P

Super simple idea, this one, but that's me all over. All my ideas Most of my ideas are simple. I just thought it would be nice to share it with the best on-line community ever!

Warning: I don't know how to sew. I got a sewing machine last year with the intention of making stuff but I haven't taken it very far. So I'm not the person to tell anyone HOW it's done but hopefully you like WHAT I've done. That's what this instructable will concentrate on.... and don't worry, it will be over in just a few steps ;)

These are the Materials I Used:

Brown Coraline

Heavy Gray Coraline

Equipment: Sew machine, Scissors, Thread... that kind of stuff

I saw this blanket for sale a few months ago and thought it was the perfect color for my Comfy Croissant idea. It was for sale in one of those stores that sells a bit of everything. Cheap, poor quality blanket imported from some low cost employment country, you know the stuff, everyone's house is full of it. I tried to make the croissant with just one layer of it by itself. I cut and sewed the shape. It was the right color but it was too thin by itself to look like a appetizing croissant so I sat on the idea for a few months . Thinking about it I figured I needed to beef it up with more fabric. Which is great. It makes the end result look and feel more luxurious and at least now it wouldn't look cheap. Appearances are everything these day. I found the thicker gray piece of coraline in an off cuts bin in a fabrics shop in town. I would have liked it to be a bit bigger but it does the job.

The gray piece measured 1.5 x 1 M (60" x 40") As I mentioned before this piece was in the off cuts bin and they didn't have anymore of it. They had other stuff, different colors, some with designs, but none as thick as the gray piece. I went with it. Although if I could choose I would have gone for a piece maybe 2 x 1.5 M (80" x 60")

I folded it in half down the middle and cut it diagonally. This was a long line to get straight, 1.8 meters (72 inches). I first made a straight line with a steel ruler and a piece of wood and then stuck a long strip of masking tape to follow as my line. One big diagonal cut is all it took then I opened out the big triangle in the center and lined up the smaller triangles, on either side with all three pointy ends coming together.

This fabric was hard to sew for a novice. Check it out, two layers together is like an inch thick. It just seems to stand up on its own fur. So while running it through the machine it seemed like the feed dogs (new term for me) had no effect on the material. The material wouldn't advance and the needle was just going up and down in the same spot. There was probably something I could have done like adjust the presser foot but like I said I'm just a novice so I was constantly feeding the fabric in on one side and pulling it out the other side by hand. The end result being that the fabric was unevenly pulled through the machine. The poor workmanship was most evident at the tip of the croissant. This was a low point in the project for me. I thought it was going to look really shoddy. But what the heck!

Now that I am writing this up I researched the problem and yes, there is a special adapter called a walking presser foot you can get for your sewing machines that will feed thicker fabric like Coraline through no problem. Anyway even if I had known about it before hand I don't think I would have forked out the 40 €uros to get one.

I wonder is there anyone left reading this instructable. If you know your stuff this this would be just too painful to get through XD

The brown piece measured 1.9 x 1.4 (75" x 55") and I had already hacked it up into the wimpy croissant. So after I cut and sewed the gray part I had to resize the brown before I could sew them together. I laid them down on the floor face to face and cut around it. Not before our extremely smoothed hair pooch got to lying on top just to let me know who's the boss. So yeah, the tips of the brown triangles hadn't lined up either (no surprises there) But like I said before: What the heck! keep going. There's a happy ending to all this trust me.

Sewing the not so thick brown fabric to the much thicker gray fabric was only slightly easier than sewing two layers of the gray. I just fumbled through it. At least I knew I had to leave a gap to turn it right-side-up (that's about all I knew). Then I sewed the gap by hand.

So, how do you shape it into a croissant? Easy, just fold the two side triangles into the center and roll it up to the tip. Then turn the two ends in towards each other et voila! a quasan fit for a king or a lazy bum, you choose.

The thing about this kind of fabric for this idea is that when you roll it up and turn the tips in to face each other to form the croissant the coraline fabric will turn the bend and not kink or buckle. Is coraline a fabric you can get everywhere? I've no idea. It's what they were calling it in the shop so that's good enough for me. Maybe its called something else where you live, maybe it's what they call Faux Fur. You could probably make it with other materials too like towel or fleece as long as you get the right color. You might have more luck sourcing this kind of material already made up as blankets for sale in home decor shops. I've just noticed they seem to be for sale everywhere you go these days. It is winter after all. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed following along.

And the happy ending/best thing I noticed after all this struggling with needles and thread was that the seams of the blanket/croissant seemed to disappear into all that fuzz and you don't really see the shoddy workmanship. Looks like I got away with it after all :P

Au revoir, bon journée