Cozy Sweater Pillow

I love my living room, even if it is a constant hodge-podge of chaos. It's the one place where our tiny apartment feels like a house and is mostly coordinated. It's where the hubs and I had furniture that matched each others when we blended our little families last summer. Grad school is teaching me to be patient and appreciate what I have now rather than being on a quest for all new things. Except boots, but that is another story.

Despite the fact that I'm pretty happy with the room, it feels like we're swimming in a sea of neutrals, which I think I'm over. I need some color in my life, especially as the winter rains start to kick in and the only color I'll see outside for months is gray.

The hubs really likes blue and so despite my own aversion to it, I snagged this pillow on clearance at Target a couple weeks ago. I like the print and that it isn't beige, but it just seems a little lonely and plain on it's own. After dreaming up all sorts of color combinations that didn't quite feel right, I realized we both like orange and an idea was born. Then I hit the thrift store, found an old sweater, and the idea was realized. Don't you just love when that happens?

Now, I just have to say that blue and orange has been my least favorite color combination of all time. I blame it on my 7th grade English teacher who was in love with John Elway and taught us grammar using sentences about the Denver Broncos. Imagine my surprise when blue/rusty orange was the first color palette to get my heart all a-flutter for this room.

Now, there are a million ways to do this, and most of it comes down to the sweater you are working with. I'll show you what I did, but this is very much a do-what-your-gut-tells-ya kind of project. I planned on covering a 16" pillow form so at the thrift store I carried a measuring tape to be sure whatever I found would actually be big enough. True to form, the one I really liked was not big enough, but it had a lot of stretch in the weave so I bought it anyway.

After snipping it up the sides and removing the sleeves, I started pinning.

The ribbed detail made it really easy to sew a straight line, so I picked which rib I was going to sew along and matched it up with the corresponding rib on the back piece. I just pinned them together but didn't cut it yet.

After pinning the sides I measured how tall the cover should be and pinned it there. I chose to leave the sweater bottom mostly open (I did stitch it a couple inches on each corner) to shove the pillow in because I figured that the finished edge would be easier to hand stitch closed than a fraying cut one.

I didn't trust myself to sew the top straight without a guide so I just snagged whichever crayola marker was the closest and marked the stitching line straight onto the sweater. Using a zig zag stitch to preserve the stretch, I sewed along the three pinned lines and then cut off the excess.

Which left me with a funky rectangle I honestly wasn't positive would work. I started to get nervous that I'd banked too much on the sweater's stretch, but shoved the pillow form in anyway.

One reason I chose to do this -even with a sweater that was a bit too small- was that I really dislike loose, floppy pillow covers. I was not excited to cover a pillow with a sweater just to have it ill-fitting and lumpy looking, and I figure that the sweater having to stretch over the pillow form actually makes it more polished looking.

Voila! Thoughts? I like the color but think it's too small for the couch. I've got 20" pillows that came with the couch I plan to recover that will be a better scale. This one will go quite nicely a our brown leather club chair, don't you think? I'm happy with it, and love that it brings a little autumn texture into our home. Now to move things around and figure out where to put it!