Tag Archives: pillow

April 19, 2013
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“Baby Soft” Pillow

I have discovered an amazing secret. In the midst of searching for fabric for my living room pillows, I found the section of the fabric store that holds the baby fabric that people use to make blankets and crib liners for their little bundles of joy. This section holds the softest fabric you have ever felt in your life. It’s like they took marshmallows, clouds, and kitten fur and knitted them into a rainbow of snuggley colors.

If we, as a society, feel that our children should have only the softest of textiles rubbed against their newborn skin, why don’t we also make this demand of our adult fabric? I mean, our skin just goes down hill from birth, am I right? Well, it usually takes a nosedive around the teen years and hopefully spikes back up for a bit (after puberty) before the wrinkles kick in, but that’s beside the point. If our skin gets worse and worse, I feel our fabric should be softer and softer as we age. No more puppy-tail-soft blankets for newborns, give them the rough stuff (like burlap or your courser linens) to toughen then up and save the feather light knits for us “older” folks.

That’s basically the long way to say I used baby fabric to make pillows this weekend. Love it. Love it so much.

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April 2, 2013
9 Comments

Geometric Pillow

Pillows make the world go round. Well, they may not really have anything to do with the earth’s rotation, but spend one night in a seedy hotel with a lumpy pillow and then tell me that you don’t care much about pillow plumpness. Aside from a cozy sleeping pillow, the next best thing is a freakin’ sweet throw pillow. Throws are great because you can change them out much more frequently (and economically) than you can a couch or a bedding set. I found this fabric last year at a fabric store here in town, and I’ve just been waiting for the right time to use it.

The time has come.

Now there are a ton of simple pillow DIYs on the web, so I’m not going to go super in depth, but it’s a relatively painless process if you have enough sewing sense to thread your machine. I cut the pillow 12″ square so I could reuse the stuffing from an existing pillow the same size (one that I was tired of looking at, of course).

Once the pieces were cut, I pinned the “correct” sides facing each other and sewed all around the pillow leaving a 1/2″ seam allowance. Make sure to leave a 2-3″ opening so that you can get the stuffing into your pillow before closing it up. Otherwise you are going to have a double layered napkin, not a pillow.

Turn your pillow inside out and use that 2-3″ opening to fill your pillow with whatever sort of stuffing you desire. Finish your creation with a hidden stitch to seal up the opening of your pillow and stand back to admire your work.

As far as sewing projects go, this is a pretty simple project. If I was really ambitious, I would have added a hidden zipper into the pillow so I could throw the cover in the wash. Ho, ho! Wouldn’t that be something! Well, there’s a lot of 2013 left, so maybe that will still happen…

Happy pillowing!

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