Recycled Sweater Pillow with Embellishment Tutorial

So this is my first tutorial. I decided to do this after I Googled and looked on Pinterest and could not find exactly what I wanted. I am by no means a professional, just a stay-at-home mommy trying to keep busy while two of my little ones are at school.

This is a completely recycled pillow. I bought the sweater and the sheer fabric at Goodwill, and used a pillow that I made probably ten years ago that my sentimental husband wouldn't let me get rid of!


Step 1
 So, to start, I laid the pillow on top of the sweater and, using my rotary cutter, I cut out a square the same size as the pillow. (I could do the same size because my sweater was very stretchy. If your isn't you need to make sure to leave enough for a seem allowance.)

Step 2
  After I had the pieces cut out, I decided to put some embellishment on it. I LOVE hearts and Valentine's Day (such a pushy holiday) is coming up, so I dug out a heart shaped cookie cutter-also from Goodwill-and traced this basic shape onto a piece of paper. I then stripped some sheer material, it worked out to be around 1 1/4" or so, it didn't have to be perfect.

Step 3
I cut out the heart shape and pinned it to the front side of the pillow shape and then using a contrasting thread, sewed the sheer fabric strips onto the sweater around the paper heart. Then I removed the paper heart and continued to sew a heart shaped spiral to the middle. I chose a contrasting thread color because I didn't have any to match, but the color did match my comforter.

Step 4
I am beginning to get excited at this point! It is looking very cute! Next, I pinned the two sweater pieces right side together leaving an opening at the bottom to shove the pillow into. Sew around the edges. I used a 3/8" seem allowance just to be sure.

Step 5
Turn that baby right side out, stuff the (polar bear) pillow into it and stitch up the bottom using a blind stitch (or slip stitch). My slip stitch needs improvement, but you can watch lots of videos on YouTube.

Step 6
Put the pillow on your bed and wait for your honey to come home and wait for him to notice, that yes-you did do something today!

It's the little (green sprouting) things.....

I think I have a control issue. Not a huge one, but noticeable. Last weekend we were celebrating my son's seventh birthday which also happens to be on New Year's Eve, so ,understandably, most people were leaving our late afternoon party to head out to other festivities. So naturally, they all decided they wanted to be close to the end of the driveway so as not to be blocked in. Sounds simple enough, right? But it nearly pushed me over the edge of a very narrow cliff to watch them all pull into our very long driveway, pass the house, turn around in the gravel parking area out back, drive by the house again on the way out and park with their two passenger side tires in or very near the front yard. We ended up with nine cars parked along the driveway and no one parked out back. My problem with this? It took weeks of back-breaking work for us to cultivate anything that remotely resembled a front yard. I lived six months in my freshly built house with a twenty foot high pile of dirt and rocks where my yard should have been . After finally getting things roughly leveled out, my husband then spent hours on his dad's tractor to get the grade just right and make it smooth. Then came the rock picking. Walking bent over picking up rocks and loading them into the wheel barrow. Then the raking and raking and raking. Finally putting the grass seed down with help from the kids. Then the fertilizer. Then spreading the hay all over it and itching from head to toe from the stuff. The dream was coming closer to reality. Then came the rain. Rain is good for grass one might think,but no, torrential downpours are not so good for a freshly seeded lawn. Down the hill it all went. The soil, the seed, the fertilizer, the hay, my lawn. All gone. Deep breath. So again with the raking, the seed, the fertilizer, the hay, the itching, and the waiting. By this time any patience I had was gone. Do you know what there is in the absence of grass? Dirt. Mud. More Mud. And, just to keep the image vivid in your mind, let me remind you that we have three young children. Which means there was more mud inside than there was outside. And all for this reason, I was having a fit about where people were parking. They were too close to my grass. I spent a lot of time on that yard, and I love to sit on my front porch a look out over my lawn to the hickory tree that seems to protect us. But, I couldn't articulate that, I just flopped about the kitchen complaining about where people were parking ad vowing to place no parking signs in the grass next year. Hopefully they will all forgive me and show up next time I invite them. What a petty thing to get so upset about. I should just be thankful that this is the only thing I had to worry about on that day.