DIY Bolster Pillow

As the name states, "Provident". In designing my living room I chose to re-use/and make some things in order to keep it frugal.

My furniture is generally hand-me-down, however, this chair was purchased brand new.

It was still discounted, but brand new at $150. Yikes. It's comfy and goes well with the rest of the furniture, so I splurged. Heck, the couch itself was only $200 because it was the floor model. I'm planning a separate blog regarding the couch, or more specifically the cat scratching post on the right hand side. You can read it here (after I write it, of course).

The chair itself is nice, but I wanted to tie it together with the rest of the room. In this blog I write about the chair makeover.

I chose to make a bolster pillow with the remaining burnt orange dupioni silk from the chair, and the curtain fabric (which you can see on the pillows above). But...who wants to spend the money on a pillow form. I'm fairly certain I got this idea from something Karen at Sew Many Ways posted ages ago. I re-used a regular old rectangle bed pillow! Cost=$0. Since I already had the fabric, the cost of this crafty day was a total of $0. If I were purchasing the fabric/pillow in anywhere near remotely recent history I would take a guess at the project costing a total of less than $10 all together. Not much fabric, and I know I get my pillows cheap at Walmart.

Pay no attention to the drool marks ;)

Once I knew the remaining silk fabric would cover the pillow, I just folded it in half and sewed a pocket. I hate hand sewing, so everything is done with my trusty sewing machine.

Fold the pillow in half and stuff it in the pocket. This was a PAIN! I had to get my legs into the action too. Hehe. Squeeze the pillow, and try to roll the fabric pocket over the pillow.

Now we're getting there! When I FINALLY had the pillow in the pocket, I pinned the ends together and sewed them shut.

It didn't look as fancy as I had hoped, so I had to accessorize.

I made a tube out of the curtain fabric (striped) and added some more of the trim that I have from my friends mom (see the chair makeover post for further explanation). This trim was a bit of challenge to sew on, because I'm not used to it, but I think it turned out well.

Here's the finished product as it sits on the chair.

What do you think?