I got back on the sewing horse and turned Sue the Napkin into Sue the Pillow—actually two pillows. I originally bought ten Sue napkins on clearance at Crate & Barrel, grabbed four more so I could make two pillows from four of them, and still have plenty left to use as dinner napkins.
Materials I used:
- Four Sue napkins (two per pillow)
- My sewing machine
- Two old pillows to use as inserts
- A needle and brown thread to close one edge by hand so the cover can be removed later
The process was simple. I stacked two napkins with the printed sides facing each other so the wrong side of the fabric was on the outside, then sewed three of the four sides on the machine while the stack was inside out. I reinforced the corners by sewing an inch or two along each end of the remaining side. After turning the cover right side out I inserted a pillow, then hand-sewed the last roughly 10-inch opening closed with brown thread so the seam blends in and can be opened later if I want to change the insert or the cover.
I don’t claim to be a professional seamstress, but my machine behaved for this small project and I managed three reasonably straight lines without ending up with a tangled nest of thread. It was quick, too—both pillows took about four commercial breaks of Modern Family to assemble, roughly 12 minutes of active sewing. I finished the final hand-stitches during Bethenny Ever After, pausing occasionally to watch and laugh.
They turned out much better than I expected—practically real pillows when fluffed and photographed for the blog. In everyday life, though, they quickly get flattened and squished; our chihuahua Burger makes it his mission to nuzzle and compress every pillow into a small, lumpy blob. He’s the reason they often look lived-in, but he’s cute so we don’t mind.
More often than not the pillows end up looking like this, thanks to Burger’s affectionate flattening:
Sometimes he even nuzzles Sue as if to say, “you’re my favorite napkin-turned-pillow.” Pillow approval from an eight-pound chihuahua is surprisingly validating.
So that’s the story of Sue the Pillows. Have you made napkin pillows recently? And yes—I’m still laughing about Gloria’s hair-ring/earring moment on last week’s Modern Family. Looking forward to tonight’s episode.