About catherine
Catherine is a CPA-turned-creative entrepreneur. She is the founder of Beginning in the Middle. an interior designer, photographer, writer, and business schemer.  She loves being cozy at home, miniature everything, and has a not-so-secret dream of living on an island one day.
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DIY $7 Sweater Pillows

DIY

pottery barnUpdate:  My pillows were featured in Country Living, DIY Network, and Yahoo DIY!  Check out my Featured page for links!

Now that the weather is changing from fall to winter, we’ve been looking for subtle ways to cozify our home.  These Pottery Barn pillows have been on our radar… but come on, $70 for a pillow cover?  We nixed that idea and decided to make our own out of old sweaters.  With a little help from my mom, we pulled it off for less than $7 each!

Here’s how to do it.

1.  Figure out what size pillows to use.  We have a few extra euro size pillows (26×26) that I wanted to use for this project, so we kept this in mind during our sweater search.

2.  Find old/discounted sweaters that look cozy.  My mom found white/ivory sweaters at thrift stores for $7 each, and happened to buy them on a day when they were an extra 25% off – woo!  We tried to find sweaters that were mens’ L/XL to fit over my 26″ pillows, but would have tried to get smaller ones for smaller pillows.

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3.  Fit, Measure, and Sew.  Before doing any cutting, we slipped the sweater over the pillow to see if it fit, and determine where to sew.  We turned the sweater inside out.  My mom then used her sewing machine to sew a straight line across the top of the sweater, just below the neck hole, and up the sides of the sweater right outside the arm holes.  We decided to leave the bottom open so it could be easily slipped on and off the pillow (this worked especially well because the sweater we were working with was a little gathered at the bottom).

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4.  Cut.   Once the neck and arm holes were sewn (inside out), we cut off the extra fabric and turned it right side out.

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5.  Slip the cover onto your pillow and be happy you didn’t spend $70 at Pottery Barn!

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Psst!  Click here to see what we did with the extra sleeves.

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  1. up-cycling, i love it. A great project for the holidays.

  2. Super cute and cozy! I have to try this!

  3. Reblogged this on To the Good Life and commented:
    I loved this idea! Right up my alley!

  4. cmw24 says:

    Thanks guys!

  5. jacqueline says:

    LOVE IT!!

  6. […] of time or money.  And as it turns out, they can be used for just about anything – not just pillows and Christmas stockings.  Chair covers?  Why not.  Gift wrap?  Of course.  Ornaments, […]

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About BEGINNING IN THE MIDDLE

Catherine & Bryan Williamson moved from NYC to Columbus, OH in 2013.  Beginning in the Middle is a journal of the couple's design and renovation projects, real estate investment and Airbnb hosting journey, travel, and other life happenings.

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I grew up in New Jersey and always had a dream of living in New York.  There was something about the energy of the city that drew me inOur journey started unexpectedly in 2012, when we decided to make a big move from New York to Columbus. The glamour of climbing the corporate ladder was wearing off, and we knew that renting an expensive small apartment and dealing with crowded subways everyday was not going to work forever. We wanted to start creating something for ourselves, and although we didn’t know exactly what that something was, we knew NYC wasn’t the place for it.

We decided on Columbus because Bryan grew up here, and we were intrigued by all of the development going on in the downtown area at the time. We drove through many of the neighborhoods and admired the boarded up old houses, most of which were built in the early 1900s, and started dreaming about the things we could do here.

I'm Catherine, and I'm the founder of Beginning in the Middle.

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