Have you ever had a dress/sweater/shirt that you liked, but you couldn’t wear anymore? That was the case for this DIY. My brother got married in December and I was a “Groomsmaid.” (Basically a bridesmaid, but on my brother’s side of the attendants.) And I had to buy a dress for the wedding. Well, since I’m pregnant, I knew I wasn’t gonna be able to wear this dress again, and I couldn’t imagine spending money on something I’d only wear once. SO, what does a thrifty person do when they can only wear a dress once and that dress just happens to be the color that you’re using in your nursery? You make an accent pillow for your nursery!
I dug around in my fabric drawer to find an accent fabric for my pillow since I didn’t want to make a simple grey pillow. I wanted something else with it. I’ve seen lots of pillows that have designs on the front out of a second fabric with exposed stitching, so I decided to make something like that.
I started by cutting out “Flower Petals” for my floral design. I just free-handed the shape. So they weren’t at all perfect, but I kind of liked that. I cut the dress in half, and set the top aside. Once I had the skirt prepped to become a pillow I pinned my first petal to the skirt so that I could start sewing. Once you’ve got one petal on you can start sewing others on. Again, it might look a little messy, but I kind of liked that it wasn’t perfect. It just seemed a little more realistic.
Once I had all my petals attached, I wanted to add something in the center for the center of the flower. I cut a circle out of a pink fabric that I had scraps of in my spare fabric. Once I cut the first circle, I continued to cut circles out of it until it got smaller and smaller until I had a sort of swirled circle for the center.
So, once this part was done, I’d actually finished the “hard part” of the pillow. Now I needed to actually make it look like a pillow rather than an unfinished skirt with a flower on it!
Turn your skirt inside out and pin it along the top edge. You’ll sew the top of the pillow here.
Turn your “skirt” back to the right side and now you can put a pillow into it. I used a pillow that I got at a local thrift store here in town for $2.00. Buying pillow forms can be expensive, and just stuffing a pillow sometimes means that you can end up with it being uneven or uncomfortable. Once you’ve got your pillow inserted into your “skirt” you need to be able to seal up the unsewn end. There are a number of ways to do this; you can insert a zipper, you can do buttons and button holes, or you can stitch it, amongst other things. I decided that my best option was to permanently seal the pillow. I chose to fold the end sort of the way that you tape up the end of a wrapped gift. But rather than tape, I sewed it shut with buttons. I had plenty of matching buttons, but I decided it would be more fun to use a bunch of similarly shaped but different colored buttons.
So, there you have it! A relatively simple way to make a pillow from an old dress! Once I have our glider all put together, this pillow will sit in the glider. For right now, it’s sitting in the crib.
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