I am on a mission to make pillows. I hit a couple of road blocks, but now I am just moving forward.
For this one, I used an old felted sweater. I found this at a thrift store and just loved it. I made some mittens from the sleeve sections, but I still had the whole body of the sweater to work with.
Felted Sweater Pillow
Supplies
- one felted sweater
- one pillow form (or stuffing)
- thread
Tools
- sewing machine
- scissors
The sweater can be already felted. (Like, the victim of a bad washing accident. Not that you would personally know about this kind of mishap. )
Here is a top tip for those of you who like to thrift or vintage shop. If you go to the Men’s area the clothing can be in better shape and made from finer materials. If you look in the VERY large sizes, you can come across some items that have already been felted and that was not recognized by the fine people working at the shop.
This one, if you look closely, says XXL pure merino wool, but if you look at how big it is and the texture of it, you can see that it was already felted. I just LOVED the color and the rich dense texture.
My pillow form was 16 x 16. So I measured and cut that out exactly.
I carefully sewed it and it looked good, but not great. I prefer a VERY stuffed tight pillow.
This fit, but the corners were too squishy.
So, my idea was to just use a little bit more stuffing and fill the corners.
It did not work out. It looked like a ball in each corner. So I took the insert out and went back to the sewing room.
I ended up cutting off the WHOLE “ribbing” on the sweater. This actually made it 2 inches smaller than the form! I thought that was WAY too much. But guess what, it was not!
There you go! it was stuffed tight, but not TOO tight.
The best part is that I got to keep a tiny bit of the “texture” in the seams from the decreases in the armpits of the sweater.
So there is a whisper to where this wool came from if you look closely.
In the end, I am HAPPY with it. Onwards! More Pillows!
