Day 163: Sewing Envelope Pillow

Time: Just over an hour
Listening to: My Week With Marilyn Soundtrack

So I've had my little Oregon embroidery done for a couple weeks now and finally got around to making it into a pillow!

I've made a couple pillows now so I thought I'd give you a little step by step to show how to make an envelope pillow.

First off, you need to measure your pillow form. I've happened to always use square pillows so the long/short side doesn't really matter. Pick the longest side (or your favorite square side) and wrap your measuring tape around it--overlapping 4 inches. Add 3 inches to that. With my square pillow, it ended up that the length would be 30 inches.

The tricky part for my length is that my embroidery piece was not 30 inches long. I measured my little map piece and it was 11 inches. 30-11=19. I wanted my map to be in the center of my pillow so I needed two pieces to sew on each side of my map of 9.5 inches.

Whew!

Ok, now on to your width. Measure the length and add 3-4 inches to that. My width (being a square and all) ended up being roughly 15 inches.

Here is the picture of my map piece sewed together with my two 9.5 inches.

As you can see, my pillow had one more tricky part...
















My map fabric piece was only about 11 inches high. And I needed it to be 15 inches! So, I cut two pieces of 30x4...and sewed that to the top and the bottom.

So now my pillow cover is finally the size that it should be at. Now you need to finish the short edges. Fold your fabric over twice and sew down the middle. I left about 1/4 seam allowance but I wasn't too picky.

Ok, now comes the fun part!

With the pertty side up, place your pillow in the middle.

Fold the sewn sides over the pillow so that they overlap by a couple inches.Then pin the two overlapped fabric pieces to secure it.

On the loose sides, draw a line to show you where you want to sew. This seems like you will be closing up your pillow, but you won't! The overlapped parts won't be sewn shut and those act as the envelope part of the pillow.

Once you mark where you want to sew, pull your pillow out and sew two straight lines across the top and bottom--following your lines.

Once you finish your sewing, trim your excess off and you should have a pillow case much closer to the size of your pillow. Here is what mine looked like:

Now flip it inside out and insert your pillow!! Here is my finished back:

Once you make a couple of them, they are so easy! Enjoy!