The beginnings of a custom pillow order: Part 1

I'm having a lot of fun here documenting what's going on in my studio.  Right now I'm working on a custom order of two pillows for a brother/sister pair.  Since custom pillows are one of my best-selling handcrafted items, I thought it would be nice to show you the steps I take from start to finish to get a completed pillow.

The very first step is tracing the letters for the name/word onto HeatNBond.  I have my letter templates in plastic page protectors in a 3-ring binder, capital letters on the front and lowercase on the back.  I simply lay my piece of HNB right onto the page and trace the letter with a black Sharpie marker.  In this step, the letters are reversed.   That will make more sense after you see what I do next.  

The recipients of these pillows are Haven and Olive.  The next photo shows their letters traced and cut apart.  I'm waiting to hear back from their dad what colors he'd like for their pillows.  After I have a color scheme, I'll "shop my stash" or shop for real to choose the fabrics I'll use.  I'll cover that in a future post.