Friday, April 27, 2012

Just Say No To Frumpy Pillows


Hard to say why we've been staring at these frumpy pillows for the past SEVEN years! Last weekend I finally decided on some fabric to cover these ugly things. I'm no math genius and I pretty much never sew with a pattern (I love reinventing the wheel)...so I was a little off in my estimate and only ended up with enough fabric to cover three of our four pillows. But three pretty pillows are better than four ugly ones! (I'm tucking the 4th one away to cover with something else and also hope to add more pillows to the stash now that I know how relatively painless making pillow covers is).

I've never sewn in a zipper before so I was pretty intimidated, but lucky for me, Prudent Baby was having "Zipper Week" this week which led me to this handy little tutorial for installing zippers on pillows. Talk about good timing in the blogosphere!


This pillow cover making adventure helped me to discover that my sewing machine has a serger-like function. Who knew?! Turns out actually reading a product manual can be SUPER helpful. Cannot tell you how many times this stitch would come in handy over the years (I'm still kicking myself for not realizing this sooner - perhaps it's time to grab a cup of coffee and read the manual from start to finish).


Anyway, who's ready to see the finished product?!


I'm so happy with how they turned out! Oh, and here are some details if you're interested. I bought 1 1/4 yards of fabric (this is Suzani Summerland/Natural by Premier Prints which is a medium weight cotton duck home decor fabric that is 54" wide) for a total of only $10.00. I made three 17x17" double-sided, zippered pillow covers (my orignal frumpy pillows were 18x18" but I wanted the finished product to be less frumpy - I thought that stuffing them into smaller covers would help give the appearance of a fuller pillow, and it did). Three zippers were about $8.50 with a coupon from JoAnn's (but I had a gift card from Christmas so they were free for me!).  Here's an up close of the "invisible zipper." Not bad for my first attempt but for some reason my bobbin thread was a little squiggly and not as clean of a stitch as I would have liked (anyone have any suggestions for fixing that?). Total cost of project: $10.00


Pillows can be really expensive, so why not make some pillow covers yourself and kiss those frumpy, outdated pillows goodbye?!

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