The easiest pillows you could ever make

Last summer I posted about pillows I had made, both for our front room and for Luke's bedroom.  In that post I talked about how I learned making pillows with old feather bed pillows is not a good idea.  After 5 months of having feathers all over the couch, floor, and our clothes (and been randomly poked more times than we can count), it was enough.  I was debating what to do (make all new pillows?  restuff the feather pillows?) when I saw this post: diy placemat pillows - no sewing machine required.  And it was like all of a sudden the heavens opened and a light shined down over my computer. 

Who knew that Target sold pre-sown pillows, just waiting to be stuffed??  Probably not even Target.  I mean, they put them in the placemat aisle and call them placemats but really, they work just as well as pillows.  The best part of this was that I HAD 4 placemats, from Target, in the buffet!  I had seen them in the store last summer and liked them immediately but knew we didn't need any more placemats so I had to think of a place I could use them.  Then I decided to make them into a valance in the kitchen so, with that justification and an extra 5% off day, I bought 4.  After a few weeks I decided against the valance idea but still kept them.  It is very unlike me to do so but for some reason they stayed in the buffet.  When I saw that post I knew exactly what to do with them.  It took me almost a month to start the project but then days later we had brand new pillows on the couch for $0 additional dollars.  ZERO.  That's like a win-win-win-win.

Initially I did pay around $4 each for the placemats so these came out to be about $16 for a set of 4.  Considering you can barely find premade throw pillows for under $20 this is a pretty good deal.  I also already had matching thread and unstuffed other pillows (NOT feather) to fill these which is what made them free.  If you had to buy those parts it might be another $10ish?

The important part is to buy the placemats with two layers.  See below?

I think it took me about an hour per pillow but most of it was mindlessly pulling stuffing out of old pillows, fluffing it my hand, and stuffing it in the new pillow.  This was an easy enough task to do while Luke was awake (finding productive things to do while he happily plays is very important).

It just took a little seam ripping, and then a little more (there was a second layer of stitches inside the visible ones).  Moving stuffing, shaking it, adding more stuffing, using a long kitchen spoon to stuff it in the corners, adding more stuffing, etc.  The stitching to finish up wasn't any harder than any other hand sewing.  Since I was breaking a thread in the middle by tearing these open I doubled up my finishing stitches to make them hold.  

And that's it!  I was able to knock all 4 out in a few days, mostly while watching Luke play or while Matt & I were watching tv at night.  They are the easiest pillows I've ever made.

I've been transitioning our front room to mostly green & blue (shocking) decorations and I love how these look.  They look better than the pink ones did (which have been moved to the porch) and we no longer get poked by random feathers.

I'm really happy with how they came out but it feels a little dangerous to know how easy and cheap these are to make.  I might be checking out the Target placemat aisle a little more frequently these days...