DIY Placemat Pillow

I love a quick and easy inexpensive DIY projects for the home. Today I am sharing my new favorite, a DIY placemat pillow. Throw pillows are a super easy way to decorate for any season or holiday. With my favorite holiday being Christmas,  you can bet, that my couch is cozied up with lots of throw pillows.

I believe I add at least one new pillow per year.

This year I decided to make a few throw pillows out of placemats. That’s right! Placemats.

First of all cloth placemats, made from the woven tapestry type of fabric is my favorite. They are usually detailed, thick and durable, yet soft enough to lay on.

I have made two versions of pillows from placemats and I am going to share with exactly how I did them so that you can do them too.

How to Make DIY Placement Pillows

You will need to gather your supplies to do this project.

Materials Needed: 

• Placemat of your choice.  I chose a $2 Red Truck and Christmas tree from Big Lots.
• Fat Quarter of fabric. Any fabric will do. Walmart sells fat quarters for $0.97.
• Polyester fiberfill or batting.
• Sewing Machine or Needle and Thread

For the fiberfill, I purchased a $3 pillow from Walmart, cut open and used the fill. This much cheaper than buying actual fiberfill from a craft store.

Making the Pillow

Once you have gathered your supplies you will want to take any tags off your placemat. Open up the fat quarter of fabric. A fat quarter should be slightly larger than a standard size placemat.

Trim the placemat to be about 1/2 inch larger than the placemat.

Place the wrong sides of the fabric together and sew all around the edges, leaving about a 6-7 inch opening. You can do this will needle and thread or with a sewing machine.

I have a cheap sewing machine I purchased a while back. My machine is very basic and does the job, and is by no means fancy.

 

This sewing machine is the closest to the sewing machine that I own and it actually does more and cost less than what I paid a few years ago.

 

Adding the Polyfill Fiber Stuffing

After all the sides are stitched together you will need to turn right side out. I like to make sure that my corners are poked out first all the way.

Tip: Just before turning right side out, cut the corners at a diagonal. Make sure not to cut the stitch line. This helps the corners be more pointed once right side out.

Fill your pillow with the fiber form your polyfill bag or household pillow. Once you have filled to the desired amount, you will be ready to close the opening on your pillow.

 

Closing the Pillow Opening

To close the DIY placemat pillow you will need to tuck inside the pillow the frayed edges of the fabric not yet sewn. You can use a needle and thread to stitch up the opening, or your sewing machine.

For the sake of time, I used my sewing machine.  I think that needle and thread does create a cleaner look when the opening is stitched by hand. You are able to have more control over the stitches whereas in a machine it can be a little easier to stitch crooked.

Once done. Style in your home or on your couch. You can even make these as great gifts! the rectangle shape gives the pillow a unique accent to any other square pillows you may have styled.

Additional DIY Placemat Pillow Ideas

Another way to create placemat pillows is to embellish them.

I chose a simple black cloth placemat from the Dollar Tree to embellish. I embellished the pillow with my embroidery machine creating an applique design.

The design I used to create this applique can be bought from this Etsy seller! I love all of their designs.

I did the same process as above, except I added the embroidery applique design first to the placement. Then continued with my fabric placing right sides together. Follow the tutorial above repeating the same steps to finish the pillow.

What do you think? I love the way they turned out.

Here is a quick video showing the process start to finish showing how I made these adorable DIY placemat pillows.

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