DIY: Upcycled Sweater Pillow Case

Have some old sweaters or cardigans that you don't wear anymore? Rather than keeping them inside your closets, why not upcycle them to become beautiful and unique pillow covers?

The sweater used here is pretty old and worn-out. You can clearly see the damages on the knits of it. It can be fixed by placing some patches. Though, for most cases, you have already bought a new sweater and just keep the damaged one, or sometimes throw it away.

This is the part where this tutorial fits best! Turn your junk to something that can spruce up your boring pillows.

Next is to get the pillow that you want to spruce up. You can decide on a color scheme to better fit your requirements.

We didn’t like how the buttons pulled, so we wanted to avoid that problem. We thought we’d create a simple tutorial on how to create one.




Materials:

1. Old Sweater – cardigans make this project super simple!
2. Pillow Form
3. Sewing Supplies

  




Instructions:
 

1. Cut back fabric. Starting with the back, cut a square 1″ larger than your pillow form. I cut a 19″ square for what I thought was an 18″ pillow form. In the end, we took out an inch of fabric, so we're not sure if our pillow form was smaller/worn down a bit or if our fabric was stretchier. But it’s better to start bigger rather than end up with one that is too tight, like our original. The original one shown above was also slightly felted, so it did not have much stretch. 

2. Cut front.

3. Use a piece of the sleeve, if necessary, to fill in the gap.

4. Stitch along the V using a zigzag stitch.

5. Trim away excess fabric on the back of the V.

6. Pin, right sides together.

7. Stitch and turn. Easy Peasy! In theory, that’s how this was supposed to go. For those who have a strong serger who can sew through thick fabrics you can easily stitch thick layers of knitted fabric. If you have a serger, we would recommend serging the edges first and then using a regular machine to stitch around the square. If you don’t have a serger, simply stitch using a straight stitch and then zigzag around the edges just to prevent any of the stitches from unraveling. Turn inside out, add the pillow form and button it up! At least THAT part was easy!

credits to: maidenjane.com