ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

This weekend my mother-in-law and I figured out how to make these totally terrific, very tailored-looking little pillows from some of my brother-in-law’s shirts.  She got this idea earlier this year after the funeral and thought it would be a really nice way to do something productive with his clothes and to commemorate him.  We kind of just made the first one using a sort of guess-and-check approach, the steps and measurements for which we scrupulously recorded, so now we have a relatively straightforward process for churning out these puffy little pillows.

Here’s a little about our thought process.  We decided square pillows are lame and not very comfortable and they just wind up getting moved out of the way most of the time since they’re not good for that much.  And we thought these pillows should get some mileage.  We also decided that those pillow inserts you buy at the store for like $7 are ridiculously overpriced, and it’s also not very cost effective to just buy tons of polyfill for all these little pillows.  We figured we’d get more bang for our buck by taking another direction.  

Materials Required (to make 2 small travel size pillows)

• one of those ~$5 bed pillows from Target
• two men’s dress shirts (my brother-in-law’s were size XL)
• a pencil
• a pair of sharp fabric shears
• stuff you need for sewing: thread, machine if you don’t plan to sew by hand, needles, pins, etc.

You are going to cut the big Target pillow in half. Do not freak out. This is easier than it sounds and you will wind up with two delightfully cute and puffy little pillows. The easiest way to do this is to measure the pillow across its longest dimension from seam to seam. The Target pillow we got measured 27-1/4 inches across, so I measured 13-5/8 inches from the left seam, made a cutting line at this distance with a pencil, and did the same on the other side so that the cutting line went all the way around the pillow and matched up exactly.

Then cut all the way around the pillow casing on the cutting line. The casing will separate into two pieces, but the stuffing will still be in one relatively static piece. Don’t bother attempting to separate the filling by hand; it’ll be too difficult to get it evenly distributed. Just use the shears and snip it right down the middle.

Take one half of the mutilated pillow and squash the filling down in as far as you can get it. Rather than going to all the effort of turning it inside out and sewing a nice seam and restuffing it through a tiny hole, just pin the raw edge up and run a zigzag stitch down the whole thing to close the pillow up. It will be a little challenging to keep the stuffing forced back because it will be putting a lot of pressure on the pins, but work relatively slowly and use both hands to guide the material through the machine. It won’t hurt to do a reverse stitch at the beginning and end of the seam. Repeat this process for the second pillow half.

The pillow you have created, assuming you have the same pillow we did, should measure about 29 inches around its narrowest dimension and about 39 inches around its longest dimension. Allowing for a half inch allowance on every seam, you’ll be cutting two rectangles of material from the shirt, each measuring 15 inches high and 20 inches wide. Measure your pillow around each direction to be sure of its dimensions. If you come up with something radically different from the measurements I just told you to expect, don’t worry. Just recalculate the measurements for your rectangles using the following formula:

Width = (long measurement + 1 inch total seam allowance)/2
Height = (short measurement + 1 inch total seam allowance)/2

Now you’re ready to begin butchering the shirt. If it’s pretty wrinkled, iron it first. Lay the shirt, button side up and with buttons fastened, on a flat work surface that won’t be damaged by the scissors, and smooth out all the wrinkles the best you can. Many dress shirts have a sewn in pleat in the upper center of the back; if this is the case and you think this is going to drive you crazy to try and work with this, you can rip out the seam where the rear yoke is attached to the shirt back, but I don’t really think it’s worth the effort when you can adjust it later after cutting. This isn’t really a terribly exact science, which is why it’s sort of a nice and easy project.

Now that you have the shirt out flat, you can sort of envision how this is going to work. The whole point is to make two rectangles the same size, with the button placket perfectly centered in one of them so that it becomes the opening for the pillowcase. Taking advantage of the buttons already sewn into the shirt saves you a lot of work and makes a really professional, tailored looking pillow when you’re done.

The first order of business is to square off the bottom of the shirt. Most button-up shirts have tails or other sculpting of the bottom hem and do not have a flat straight seam. So to make a rectangle, you’ll want to make a cut across the bottom of the shirt, perpendicular to the button placket. I found it helpful to make a pencil mark, check it all the way across to make sure it really was perfectly perpendicular, and then to cut the top layer of fabric before smoothing and cutting the second layer below. Since nothing’s pinned down, this prevents uneven cutting due to fabric slippage.

Sorry. I got really involved at this point in the process and forgot to take pictures of the next couple of steps. After squaring the bottom of the shirt, measure 15 inches (or whatever you determined the correct height to be using the formula up above) up from the bottom edge you just created and do the same thing over again: make a pencil line parallel to the bottom edge and perpendicular to the button placket, cut the top layer, smooth the material, and cut the second layer using the top cut as a guide. This is the top edge of the rectangle. It will probably come up somewhere close to the armpits of the shirt. Set the top of the shirt aside. You can use the scraps in something else, such as applique on a contrasting pillow, patchwork in a different project, or something else entirely of your own derivation.

You now have a sort of vaguely looking rectangular thing with oddly shaped ends that don’t quite make it a trapezoid. Measure 10 inches (or half of your calculated rectangle width) from the very center of the button placket on each side and square off the right and left edges. This will get you a rectangle with a total width of 20 inches and the placket centered in the panel.

If your shirt has the tuck in the back panel and it interferes with the width of your rectangle after you have made your cuts, smooth the fabric, check the measurements, and trim the excess off.

Turn the two rectangles so that right sides are facing, and pin all edges together. Sew a regular straight seam with an allowance of 1/2 inch all the way around the rectangle, then overcast all raw edges with a tight zigzag stitch. Don’t turn it inside out just yet. You’re going to box the corners and trust me, it is going to look way nicer this way. The pillows are so puffy that it’s kind of a waste to have sharp corners - nothing winds up filling them, so boxing the corners looks tailored and makes the pillow look fuller.

So for starters, take one of the corners you’ve created and lay it out flat.

Then pick up the corner and turn one side to face you. Grasp the fabric from each side, which is currently flat together and touching, and pull the two layers out to the either side until the two corner seams are now lying flat together. It sounds really weird in words, but try looking at the picture and fooling with the corner and you should be able to get it.

Once you’ve done this, smooth the fabric you’ve just newly flattened and make sure the sides of the little triangle this creates are not creased or wrinkled up and are perfectly flat and even on each side. Then pin the fabric to keep it from slipping. You’ll notice that above the place where the two seams come together at the corner, there’s a little flap of fabric (slightly visible at the top of the corner in the above picture) that folds over easily at the line of stitching. Fold that back and use the “actual” corner (where the two stitch lines meet) as your point of measurement. Measure 1 inch straight down from this point and make a pencil line perpendicular to the stitch lines (the same direction as the pin in the picture).  You will then stitch along this pencil mark across the corner.  

I know this sounds confusing, and it’s kind of difficult to explain. If you’re not sure you have it, my advice is to run a basting stitch when you first sew it, turn the corner right side out and compare it to this picture of a finished corner. Note that my two seams don’t line up perfectly. If I got away with it, you can too! But that doesn’t mean don’t try. Repeat the boxing process for each corner, making sure to stitch forward and backward with each one once you know you’re doing it right.

You should be done by now! Turn the pillowcase inside out, unbutton it if you hadn’t already, and stuff the pillow inside. It will be very snug and full. Stick your hand inside and squash the pillow around to force the stuffing into the corners, then button it back up. This thing is now ready for a road trip, a plane trip if you care to carry on something this size, or just loafing on the couch. I mean, you can tell what superior neck support this thing offers compared to most couch pillows. Seriously. You’ve done a good thing.

Ignore our Thanksgiving leftovers in the background! We were working on both that and the pillows yesterday morning.

You’ll note that in all likelihood, you’re going to end up with a back panel that sports some of the pocket or perhaps some other decoration from the front of the shirt. My mother-in-law and I elected to leave this intact rather than ripping it out, since a) pain in the ass, and b) we liked the idea of these pillows having a built-in reminder that they were repurposed from her son’s shirts. If you can’t stand this, you can probably use a seam ripper to pull off pockets or appliques from the front of the shirt before you sew the whole thing together. You might need to iron or wash it after doing that, since a lot of times pockets and similar things will leave an indentation or some other indication that they were there.