The North End Loft: five minute pillow

I bought this cute bird tea towel last week at Cost Plus with making it into a pillow in mind. They had so many cute prints, it was hard to choose just one. This one is embroidered with fringe at the bottom edge, and the cost was $10.

Cost Plus World Market

You can check out all the cute patterns here at their website.

I love toss pillows, and I'm kind-of becoming a toss pillow junkie. Finding storage space for all of them when I change them for seasons and holidays is becoming a problem.

For instance, these are the toss pillows from my former guest room that I packed away in plastic bags down in the basement when my daughter moved back into her old bedroom. Now that she's gone again, I'm redoing the guest room, and even though I still like all these pillows, they won't work anymore with the new decor.

I guess I'm not just a pillow junkie, maybe I'm a pillow hoarder, too, because I don't want to give these pillows away and start over. I might want these pillows again one day, right? I mean, this is a cute pillow, right?

RIGHT?!

(Hoarder...)

So even though there are lots of gorgeous new pillows out there calling my name, I've decided to start making covers for the ones I already have. Then I only have to store the covers, not the whole pillow. When I saw this cute little tea towel, I immediately thought it would make a sweet pillow cover.

I searched Pinterest and adapted Manuela's glue gun pillow cover tutorial at A Cultivated Nest for my sewing machine.

I wrapped the tea towel around my little brown pillow and marked on the towel where I wanted the top and bottom of the design to be, then I measured how much seam allowance I needed on each side. I turned it inside out, folded the towel at the marks, and pinned and sewed the sides on my sewing machine.

Right side out again, you can see how the folded-over bottom hem of the tea towel becomes the opening for inserting the pillow, envelope style. The whole thing took less than five minutes!