Drop Cloth Pillow Covers | Easy DIY

Today I have an easy DIY pillow cover project!

Using a painters drop cloth and thrift store pillows you can create these adorable farmhouse style pillows! Let’s get started!

A couple of weeks ago

I shared with you how to sew a drop cloth shower curtain. The drop cloth that I used for that project left me with a piece of leftover fabric. Let me just tell ya’ we don’t waste such precious commodities around here!  I decided to use the leftover fabric to make these overlapping, envelope style pillow covers.

Pillow forms can be expensive

so I like to keep my eye out at thrift stores for high quality, down filled pillow forms.  Here are two I found while visiting one of my daughters in Virginia.  She is a big thrifter also and had already found the Disabled American Veterans Thrift Store in her town. We headed right over to the store and I found these two down-filled pillows for just a few dollars. The outside fabric was in good condition but it wasn’t the style I was looking for. So out came to seam ripper.

They were easy to remove

and fortunately I discovered a good quality pillow form inside. I tossed both pillow forms in the dryer on a high heat setting for about 20 minutes. The pillows were in good condition I just wanted to be sure that they were also sterile.

The piece of leftover drop cloth from the shower curtain project was a long rectangle that measured approximately 100″ long x 24″ wide. I wanted to eliminate bulk so I cut off the long edge with the hem.  Don’t toss that cut off hem just yet!  I have a plan for that 🙂

Wrapping the cloth around the pillow form helped me to determine how much excess to cut off.  An overlap of 10″-14″ will be needed for the envelope style pillow cover so my finished measurement for a 22″ pillow form was approximately 24″ x 50.”  Knowing these measurements I knew that I had just enough fabric for both pillow covers!  The long rectangle was cut in half, giving me two pieces of drop cloth fabric in just the perfect measurements for this project.  I used my serger on all the raw edges and I kept one of the pre-made side seams.  If you don’t have a serger, you can use a zig-zag stitch on the edges or just use pinking shears.

Fold the pillow cover so that the seam edge is down and overlap the raw edge.  This makes more sense if you look at the image below.  The pillow cover has to be sewn right sides together and then turned inside out.  A bit of backwards thinking has to happen to achieve this 😉

Stitch the side seams using about a 1″ seam allowance.

Use the envelope style opening to turn the pillow cover right side out.

Use your finger to push out the corners.

Insert the pillow form

First grab the corner of the pillow form and then put that corner into the corner of the pillow cover. Wow that is a lot of corners! Do this with the first two corners then turn the pillow form around and do the other two corners.

And there you have it!

An overlapping, envelope-style pillow cover from a drop cloth! Wasn’t that easy?

Remember that seam

that we cut off at the beginning of this project? Well, I decided to tie it around the pillow for added texture! Isn’t that cute?

You can also use the overlap/envelope side as the decorative side. Whatever you choose – it’s up to you!

Look how good these pillows look on our sofa!

Don’t you just want to take a nap!  They are perfect for Sunday afternoon movie watching too!

The drop cloth pillows also look great on a bed!

Because they are down-filled they are super soft and squishy!  Ready for a guest or family member to snuggle up and read a good book!

Thanks for stopping by for this quick tutorial on drop cloth pillow covers!

I would love to hear your ideas of how to use leftover drop cloth fabric!  Share your ideas in the comments!

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