Meg vs. Decor: Upcycled Flower Pillows

I got extra crafty this year for Christmas (meaning I did some crafts, since I usually do none). In my family we draw names for Christmas presents, and John and I got my mom and her cousin. So they both got flower pillows. I fell in love with them when I saw these on Pinterest:

They are sold here.

Mine don't look nearly this good, but maybe someday I'll get there.

Here are two of the three that I made:

For both pillows, I purchased sweaters at the thrift store and gave them a good washing. I sewed a straight line from one armpit to the other to create the rectangle pillowcase, then cut off the arms/neck area above the line to use for the flowers. The purple sweater already had a zipper, so I just sewed up the bottom of the sweater and made the side with the zipper the back of the pillow. The green sweater had no zipper, so I purchased a matching one and installed it in the bottom of the sweater (you can see it hanging down).

Obviously I used different techniques for the flowers. The purple sweater was conceptually simpler, but not really much faster to execute. I simply took the arms/neck area, twisted and rolled it to look like a flower, and (rather haphazardly) sewed it down. It had a hood, so I sewed that down to look like a leaf. Because the sweater was pretty heavy, I had to go around all of the rolled edges pretty thoroughly to get the flower to stay down. Some of you who actually know how to sew will probably be able to do this much faster than I did.

For the green pillow, I cut off one of the sleeve cuffs and rolled it up to create the middle of the flower, then cut the rest of the sweater up into petals of various sizes. On the pillow I made for my mom (not shown), I threaded all of the petals onto one thread to hold them together before I sewed them down, but I didn't feel like that made the process any easier, so I don't really think it's worth doing. On this green pillow, I took each petal, scrunched up the bottom, and sewed it onto the pillow, starting with the smallest petals in the middle and working out.

I have some more sweater pillows planned (sans flowers) that I'll share later. All-in-all, I was excited at how these came out for my first attempt.

And if you'd like to see some more pretties, check these out:

Felt flower pillows
Fleece flower pillows
More felt
Even more felt
Fun pom poms

Swoon... sigh... add to checklist under "someday" category.