How to sew a pillow (room makeover)

In my opinion, sewing a pillow is the  easiest thing you can sew (pillow case skirt is #2).  As long as you can sew a straight line, you’re good to go. I don’t even measure! And I certainly don’t use zippers. The room makeover was spontaneous and happened in one weekend. With the Traget inspiration pillow in hand, I went to Joanns on a hunt for fabric. I bought one yard of the orange and yellow circle and half a yard of both the plain yellow and turquoise corduroy.

This is me trying to decide what exaclty I want to do with my fabric…

Yep!  That’s a pillow stuffed in a tank top. (Never hurts to try!)

Here is the original pillow situation. I love the bugs, but they aren’t working on the dark grey futon. I reused the pillow inserts to make some fancy new pillows. I think that is why I kept throwing the brown blanket over the sofa or maybe we just really miss the brown couch we had to ditch.

Here is a closeup of the Target inspiration pillow and the $15 of fabric I bought at Joann’s.

I knew I wanted to re-use all of my old couch pillows. All of the pillows actually had zippered covers, and I just slid the pillows at of the covers, folded the pillow covers up and stuck back in the closet. Andy calls these feather pillows the porcupines. The feathers stick out and poke your head. It’s not nice. I decided if I’m going to take the time to recover the pillows, I am at least going to cure the pokey problem. I used an old towel and an old t-shirt. I literally just cut out 2 matching squares about 1 inch smaller than the size of the pillow. I sewed up 3 and 1/4 sides and then stuffed the pillow in the cover. I hand stitched the pillow close. You can clearly see the porcupine needles in the un covered pillow…

I did the same thing, but with a t-shirt to the second pillow.

It just so happend that the 1/2 yard of courdoroy fit my 2 existing green pillows perfectly. I cut 4 rectangles exactly the same size and ironed the fabric. Placde the right sides together and sewed up 3 and 1/2 of the sides. I like to make sure my sweing machine gets all 4 corners. Turn the fabric right side out, stuff the pillow insert inside, and hand stich it up!

I did the same thing for the 2 yellow/ orange patterned pillows. I used the plain yellow fabric for the back and the fancy fabric for the front.  I found it is way easier to hand stitch the sides if you pin the opening shut first.

I decided to embellish the hand stitching on the turquoise corduroy with yellow thread. I like it.

The 5th pillow used to be on my bed, but we never actually put decorative pillows on our bed… so I decided to put this one to good use. I was trying to save the fancy patterned fabric, but this was all that was left of the yellow so I attached a teeny bit of fancy to the yellow. Patchwork is A-OK in my book!

I did a little embroidery to jazz up the plain yellow pillow. Kind of reminds me off the blog : )

Let’s see the before one more time…

And the pillow makeover…

And that’s that for the pillow saga. It took about 3 hours to make 5 pillows. The most time consuming part is hand stitching, but is certainly not hard. Do you ever make your own pillows? Have you ever tried to stuff a pillow in a tank top? How do you feel about feather pillows? Good, bad, annoying?  I’d love to hear…

• Tuesday: Room Inspiration (Rug, target pillow, Grand Buddy’s Van Gogh prints)
• Wednesday: How to sew a pillow (and how to make a feather pillow not stick you)
• Thursday: Creating Really Awesome Free Trips: Washington, D.C.
• Friday: Metal table makeover and antlers
• Tuesday: DIY felt art
• Wednesday: Wood slice coasters
• Thursday: Creating Really Awesome Free Trips: Curacau Island
• Friday: Guest post by my mom and her steel wool coffee table