This winter I was dying to make some recycled sweater pillows. So I rounded up a few fun wool sweaters & felted them. (Washed them in hot water until they shrunk into a felt like fabric.)
I took my shrunken sweaters to my local craft store and "tried on" several pillows until I found a fit for each one.
I then cut the sweaters to fit the pillow forms. Two of them required only one cut, which was straight across under the arm holes. The other two I basically cut 2 squares.
For the 2 that required only 1 cut, I turned the sweater inside out and sewed up the cut side. I turned the sweater right side out and put the pillow form inside. Then using the same technique used to seam a sweater closed in knitting (the mattress stitch) I seamed the bottom of the "pillow" where the ribbing on the sweater was.
For the other 2 pillows, I put the right sides together and seamed 3 sides, and all but about 4 inches of the 4th side. This left just enough room to STUFF the pillow form inside once the sweater was turned right-side out. I then had to hand stitch this last bit closed, folding the fabric in for a nice hemmed edge.
The striped pillow sold on my Etsy store, the other 3 are currently at a store in North Carolina, but if you're interested, just let me know and I'll see if they're still available!
This was a fun project! Now that winter's over, you know exactly what sweaters you were tired of wearing or seeing on your family members! So get those tired sweaters out of the closet (or storage) and give them new life!
Very cute, I think I will try that this fall. I love sweater pillows in winter, they're so cozy.
ReplyDeleteThose are beautiful! Great way to re-use a sweater. You just taught me what felting is! I always wondered what that meant!
ReplyDeleteIt is a fun fall project! I already have a new stack of sweaters from those I didn't wear this winter to turn into pillows!
ReplyDeleteStephanie - another term "felting" is used for is knitting. In knitting terms, you basically knit something with a 100% wool, and it will be MUCH larger & floppier (loosely knit) than what you want the end product to be, because you put this loosely knit what-ever-it-is in the washing machine and "felt" it. It will shrink about 30% (or more) and it shrinks more horizontally than it does vertically - but the end result is the same type of felt-like fabric. So that's another way to felt!