jumping on the bandwagon

(Or, the main reason why thrift store employees think I'm crazy).
Before I get to today's project, let's take a look at the before and after, k? With a little cut and paste, this old thrift store "Little House on the Prairie" dress began its new life as throw pillows. Check it:

I'm totally stoked with how this turned out.
Judging by the sheer number of pins that pop up on pinterest daily featuring anything with a chevron print, I'm guessing I'm not the only one that digs it. And man, do I dig it. And why not?

via

via

Clearly yellow and gray are popular combinations too. But that's beside the point. The pattern is so fresh and clean, and if you leave off the flower embellishments on the pillows, it's generally gender-neutral (Which is a major requirement of Tim's when I find something I want to add to our home. Does it look girly? Is it flowery? Most of the time, if I say yes to either of those things, I get vetoed).

We wanted more pillows on our ikea couch, and I thought that chevron pillows would be perfect (and Tim approved of the pattern, so we were in business!).  But I was NOT about to fork over thirty to forty bucks APIECE.

So of course the next logical step was to make one.

I was all ready to buy some chevron fabric, when I remembered two things that gave me an idea. 1) a couple years ago I stumbled upon this blog post by Dana at Made, who used striped fabric to make chevron fabric, and 2) I had that fabulous stripe fabric in the skirt of that Goodwill dress I picked up a while back.

I was inspired, so I did it. And it worked. Here's how to do it:
Before I begin, I have to give a caveat: the stripes on the dress fabric showed up on both sides of the material. So, there wasn't really a "right" or "wrong" side. If your stripes only show up on one side, you have to follow Dana at Made's tutorial.

Once I had a rectangle wide enough, I sewed it to some solid backing and stuffed it with some cotton stuffing (I tore apart an old pillow to get both the upholstery for the backing and the stuffing. This project was "green" all the way). And that's it!

It was super simple, like sewing 101. Can you cut straight (turns out that for me, the answer to that one's no)? Can you make the machine go straight (Sometimes)? Then you can do this. And your couch will thank you for it.

Of course, you could just buy some chevron fabric (Fabric.com has some great ones for cheapish!) and make a pillow from that. Or bite the bullet and spend the 40 bucks to buy a premade chevron pillow. That'd work too.