It's SEW easy!

I bought these placemats at Ross several months ago.

I never intended to adorn my dining table with these. They are quilted placemats so I immediately thought that they would make perfect pillows. Yes. Pillows.

Oh, and did I mention the price? Take a look:

$8.00 for four. Now tell me where you're going to find two brand new pillows for $4.00 a piece. Maybe Goodwill, but then you have to worry about another person's dust mites and that just grosses me out. I do draw the line somewhere.

So these placemats have been sitting in my catch-all master bedroom closet. You know, the closet I told you about yesterday? As previously noted, my last little sewing project inspired me to wipe the dust off of Ms. Singer and put her to work. See. She's all sparkly clean and ready to work...

Well, here goes my first tutorial. It shouldn't be a difficult one to write since this sewing project really couldn't be much easier.

These placemats had a different design on each side. See?

This little fact made these placemats perfect for me, someone who likes to change things up often. So, I pinned two placemats together with straight pins, making sure that each side had a different pattern.

Then I sewed the two placemats together, being careful to stay close to the binding.

Make sure you leave several inches open so you can fill your pillow.

For the next step you need this:

Then you stuff the pillow to your heart's content. Make sure to push the filling way into the corners so you have nice firm corners. Lily was mommy's little helper for this part.

Then I started to hand sew the openings shut on each pillow. I got a few stitches done on the first pillow and remembered that I have no patience for hand sewing. So, I pushed the stuffing in the pillow around so that it would fit under the presser foot and I machine sewed the holes shut.

Tada! All done. Now aren't you anxious to know what pillows made from placemats look like? Well, let me show you:

Option A:

Flip it over and you have Option B:

Look at how nice the edges look after they are sewn:

This is what they look like lounging on my bed:

You know what's so awesome about this whole "pillows from placemats" concept? Placemats are not expensive! I noticed that several stores had all their spring and summer placemats marked down drastically at the start of fall. I'm sure they do that at the end of each season. If you stay on the look-out, I bet you can find placemats for every season. That translates into pillows for every season.

I found really nice sage colored quilted placemats at K-Mart. They were from Martha Stewart's summer line so they were clearanced. I didn't buy them but if I would have I would have had a nice set of pillows that matched my wall color that I could use in the summer.

Another great thing about this simple project is that it requires minimal sewing experience. If you can operate a sewing machine in its very basic form, you can make these pillows.

Until next time,

Amber