$2 to Glam

Check out this cute little pillow I made last night!

I found a tutorial for this pillow online (here) and tweaked it to make it work with the supplies I already had.

We are changing up our living room a bit and some of our pillows definitely need to be recovered to work with our new color scheme.  I found a 20″ wide remnant of this fabric on sale at Hancock Fabrics last week for $1.75, and even though I wasn’t sure it was the right shade of blue for our living room, the price was too good to pass up.  When I got it home I realized it matched our other blue pillows perfectly!  Not only that, but the fabric is super thick and durable upholstery fabric – sure to stand up to pets and friends 🙂

Since the fabric was already 20″ wide and I was covering a 20″ square pillow, I had no choice but to cut the front piece to 20″ square and make my seams as narrow as possible.

The other pieces you see on top here are the two back parts of the pillow.  I decided to make a “pocket style” pillow instead of either 1) permanently sewing the pillow form into the pillow case or 2) adding a zipper I would have to buy.

Next step was to hem the two edges of the pocket  that would be visible on the back of the pillow.

Here is the pillow pinned together, right sides in, with the pocket back facing up:

Then with the side seams sewn:

After I clipped the corners and zig-zag stitched the raw edges, I turned the pillow case inside out and tried it on the pillow form.  It fit – yay!  Next step was to cut out the circles for my flower.

The online tutorial said the flowers looked best when the circles weren’t perfect, so I just snipped out five wonky circles from my remaining fabric.  Next I got to play with fire!

No seriously.  To keep the edges of the circles from fraying, I lit a candle and carefully singed the edges.  Several times the fabric caught on fire, but I just had to keep a cool head and blow out the fire and then keep right on going!

My finished circles looked like this.

The last step was to pick the spot on the pillowcase where I waned the flower and sew it on.  I used a white button I had on hand to adorn the center of the flower.

What do you think?  Not bad for a $2 makeover, huh?  I love my little flower pillow and I think the couch likes it too 🙂

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