Tutorial - How to sew a slipcover for a nursing pillow (when you have zero sewing ability)

I'm not even close to being talented when it comes to sewing. Even the minor projects that I do work on I surely do wrong, but when something needs to be done I give it a try. 


One of the projects that I did recently was making a slipcover for my nursing pillow. I have a few things that I use for nursing Ben, but the classic nursing pillow tends to be my go-to item. As a result it ends up lying around all over the place. I had thought I bought a fairly cool one (it's tough to find these in colours other than pastels), but after a while even the dark blues started to bug me when seen thrown on the couch. Plus, the fabric was really cheap and after two washes it was terribly faded...so twenty washes later...





I decided to make a quick cover in a fabric that was a little more in keeping with our house. It now blends in a bit more on the couch, I love it!





As I did this I thought I would take pictures to share the how-to, since truely anyone can do this if I can. So here we go!


Materials:

• One yard of a fabric of your choice
• Scissors
• Pins
• Thread
• Sewing machine (unless you want to make a week of this project and do it by hand)

Instructions:


Fold your yard of fabric in half, and leave one side slightly longer than the other. Make a cut on the fold, but keep the pieces together like this for now.


Using your nursing pillow, make a template on your fabric (on the smaller portion). I'm sure you can use some sort of proper fabric pen with disappearing ink for this...I however used regular marker because my sewing box has one spool of thread and a pack of gum in it.

On the larger side of the fabric, make a cut that will land above the middle like in the picture below. This will end up being the part that you slip the pillow into.

Take the two pieces that make up the larger part of the fabric and fold over the edges twice. Iron and sew these seams.

Lay the piece with the template drawn onto it face down, and lay these two pieces good sides down on top of it, overlapping the sewn portions. You want these to overlap a good couple of inches so that the fabric underneath doesn't peek out. Note: overlap them a bit more than I did here because I didn't follow my own advice.

Flip everything over so that you are now looking at the template again. Pin the fabric all together now, just slightly inside of the line. Put a few pins across the sewn parts too just for ease of handling.

Cut around your template.

Sew around the line, taking your pins out as you go.

Give the whole thing a quick iron (and wash if you didn't before you started), and pop it on your pillow! Done and done.

I now LOVE the look of this pillow strewn about my livingroom. And Benjamin seems to approve as well...