Sweater Pillow with Buttons

It's officially fall, y'all!

I'm really excited about changing our home decor with the seasons - nothing super drastic, just some little touches here and there to give the essence.  A quick, easy, and cheap way to do this is by changing out your throw pillows.

I've been loving the idea of sweater pillows - the coziness of the textures in sweaters just oozes fall warmth for me.

There are plenty of options on the market - just check my pinterest page!  But I thought it would be cool to upcycle old sweaters for pillows instead!

Every time I drop off donations at Goodwill, I also peruse the store to see what treasures might be lurking in there.  On a recent trip, I spotted two sweaters that had great colors and textures for my pillow project.  At $5 each, they were perfectly on-budget.  I brought them home and washed them on hot and with oxiclean to get them nice and sanitized.

I found pillow forms half-off at Hancock's over the weekend, and those were my materials!

I started with the sweater with the buttons - it seemed more fun.  I haven't gotten to the second one yet.

After studying the shape of the sweater, I realized I'd need to cut off kind of a lot of the fabric - the neck, the sleeves, and the pockets.  This would leave me with sort of a small pillow, but since they were for our accent chairs, that was OK.

I started by pinning the right sides together in my shape.  Sweater knit is super forgiving, so I didn't worry about measuring it for size or anything, I pretty much winged it.

I had to remove the top two buttons - one would go to waste, and the other would get caught in the seam.  After I sewed the seam, I sewed the button back in place.  I moved the extra one to a lower spot, creating a nice line of buttons all the way down the pillow.

I sewed the buttoned seam together to take the pressure off the buttons.  This kept the buttoned part from gaping open.

I sewed three sides of the pillow, and also about two inches on either side of the fourth side.  Then I crammed my pillow form in there, and hand-stitched the fourth side closed.  I mushed the pillow around to get the form aligned well.

Upcycled sweater pillow

And that was that!  About an hour of work and $11 per pillow, and I was done!