Quick and Simple Pillows

I love easy projects, don't you?

I wanted a quick and easy set of pillowcases to gussy-up our sofa before having guests over. Pillows can totally change the way a room (and your back) feels.

Enter dinner napkins, found on $3 clearance at Target: 

Using a pencil, I marked my seam lines and button hole locations. Why buttons? Because they are fun (important) and a nice way to "close" the pillow case.

Then it was a five-minute straight stitch project, plus a few additional minutes to sew in the buttonholes. I'm not counting, of course, the 20 minutes that it took me to figure out how to operate my new-to-me 1970's sewing machine. Let me just say after muddling through the instruction manual: technical writing has improved greatly over the last 30 years.

I sewed my buttons double-sided. By that, I mean there are buttons on both sides of the fabric. That way you don't know which is the button side and which is purely decorative. Why? Because I'm fancy like that.

Shove in a pillow form, fasten the buttons and you're finished!

You could, of course, make this an even easier project by forgoing the fancy and using a whip stitch to sew your pillow case closed. But where's the fun in that?