Re-covered pillow #4, Weaved Pillow

I had one last pillow that came with our couches and I wanted to save it for a really good idea. And I got it! I'm way excited about this pillow and it's definitely my favorite. I got the idea from an old lady's dress :) haha Here it is...

Materials:
~ Old, ugly pillow
~ Fabric
~ Ruler
~ Pencil

I knew that I wanted a plain back for this pillow and a solid color underneath all the weaves in the front. I decided to do white in the front and red in the back. But when I went to cut out the white I realized that I didn't quite have enough fabric! So I decided to just cut up the stuffing of my old, ugly pillow to match the size of the fabric that I had left :) Problem solved! Now it's a kidney pillow instead of a square one.


Next was to measure how many strips of fabric I would need for my weave. You can do this with just one color but I decided to alternate red and gold. I took a ruler and drew out lines everywhere I wanted a weave strip to be. I drew this all out on the wrong side of my fabric (although since it's a solid color it didn't really matter which was the wrong side).

Then I measured how many pieces of red and gold I would and how big they each needed to be. I ended up doing 14 red pieces and 12 gold pieces. I sewed right along the edge and then turned them inside out.Two quick tips about sewing these strips together. When you're sewing a bunch of stuff all right after the other don't worry about cutting the thread and re-starting your sewing line for each one. Just sew them all on one big seam. Does that make sense? So when you get to the end of one piece, leave a little space and start the next one. Here's what you end up with, go ahead and just snip the extra thread in between each piece. This saves a lot of time and headache!
Tip #2: Most of you have probably seen this. If you ever have to turn something small inside out pin a safety pin to one side of the fabric at either the top or the bottom and then push the safety pin all the way through until the fabric is totally right side out. This saves even more time and headache!
Once I had all my strips of fabric right-side-out and ironed down flat I pinned them onto my fabric. Then I sewed all the way around the outside edge.

To make sure that the pieces of fabric stayed in place once the pillow got on my couch I tacked them down in the back. Every time the strips crossed each other I tacked down the bottom piece, making sure to not poke through to the top piece so as to keep my thread hidden. The back is ugly but this ended up in the inside of my pillow and it didn't matter what it looked like :)

After that was done I sewed the front and back together, turned it inside out, stuffed it, and hand-stitched the last few inches. That's it!! What do you think?!



Cost:
~ Old, ugly pillow: $0.00
~ Fabric: $0.00
~ Ruler: $0.00
~ Pencil: $0.00

Re-covered Pillow #4, Weaved Pillow: Total Cost ~ $0.00