guest room pillows

I have long admired the many (many!) DIY sweater pillows out there. There are some really beautiful sweater pillows out there, and I knew just what to do with this old sweater of mine.

Sweater before

I got this sweater when I was in High School. I know this because it has a “The Limited” label, which I believe I last shopped in around 1999 (when they still had a store in the Exton Mall in PA). It’s still in OK condition, although there was maybe just a slight hint of staining around the collar. Even though technically this sweater still fit, it wasn’t comfortable. It was just a little tight, and it was a bit too warm for me. The first thing I did was wash it (even though it says not to). I wanted it to shrink as much as it was going to, and I wanted to get all my sweat out of it before turning it into a pillow. It didn’t shrink much and it looked a lot better.

Next, I fit the pillow inside the sweater to see what I’m dealing with.

Fill Sweater with Pillow

Turns out, it filled out my 20″ pillow pretty perfectly. It stretches it just a little bit, but not enough to make it look weird. So why not save myself a whole lotta time by just using the already sewn edges, and just finishing it off? So I figured out how I wanted to close the neck opening:

Figure out where to sew closed

And then, I figured out where I needed to cut the sleeves:

cut sleeves off

I gave myself a little bit of extra fabric so that I could fold the edges in. But before sewing anything shut, I decided to add a little something extra to the front, an embroidered heart from a fluffy white yarn.

Fluffy white yarn

This is where my hoarding crafts supplies comes in handy. I have had this yarn forever and I’m not entirely sure where it came from. I mean it, it’s over 20 years old.

Embroidery needle

I used an embroidery needle with an extra large eye so that I could get the yarn through it. The sweater has an open enough weave that using a big needle doesn’t make any difference in the appearance.

Sew a heart

Now, I free-handed this step. I found the “center” of the pillow and just started working my way around. When I came back around the other side, I tried to match the stitches up but it still came out a little wonky. I’m not too worried about it though because I can 1. always turn the pillow over so you can’t see it, or 2. the yarn is so light compared to the sweater, it doesn’t stand out too terribly much.

Heart on Pillow

Ready to sew up

After finishing the heart, I stuffed the pillow back in. Now I’m ready to sew it shut!

I started with the neck opening:

Sewing the openings closed

And just did a simple whip-stitch to close it. I used the same fluffy yarn, and it lends a little “charm” to the pillow.

Finished neck

Here’s the neck all finished up.

And then I worked on closing the sleeves, and finished up along the bottom. Since the bottom edge of the pillow was already nicely finished, I decided to just whip stitch it without turning the edge over. I think it looks nice.