How to turn a cross stitch kit into a pillow |Keeping it Real

Hello, and welcome! Today I'm going to show you how I turned a cross stitch kit into a pretty pillow (with envelope closure).

I had this cross stitch kit in my crafts closet for a long, long time. At some point in the past I started it but then it was left abandoned until this past summer, when I finally took it out and decided to finish it once and for all.

This was the original kit package:

I'm not even sure they make these anymore. And yes, the original kit was intended as a pillow, but you had to buy the pillow in separate and then, I suppose, sew both together. I never bought the original pillow part of the kit (and probably it's not being sold anymore either).

So...I finished cross stitching the kit and was left with this...

...and a set of yarn leftovers that I used to make a mini pouch (you can read about that here).

So I searched my stash and discovered a velvety fabric that I cut into two rectangles (same width as the kit, height enough to overlap each other after hemming.

I hemmed two of the long edges (the ones that are visible) and then placed all pieces right sides together, as shown below:

Then all I had to do was to sew all around (no need to leave an opening to turn inside out since the back pieces are just overlapped), trim the excess fabric, clip the corners and turn it inside out.

Tip: when sewing all around, make sure your stitches are as close as possible to the cross stitch, so that when you turn inside out none of the ugly canvas shows up at the edges of the pillow. And yes, machine sewing works just fine, that's what I did.

Here's how it looks, front and back:

Then I just bough a cheap pillow at the dollar store and placed it inside my new pillow cover:

If you don't find a pillow that matches the size of your pillow cover, you will probably need to either sew one from scratch or adjust a store bought one. I've done both in the past, but the easiest way is to just go with story bought if you can (and it's usually also the cheapest alternative, since buying polyester filling in large quantities can be expensive).

And that was it. Overall, sewing this cross stitch kit into a pillow was easier than I thought it would be (I was afraid I wouldn't be able to adjust the kit canvas to the fabric so well) and it turned out really pretty: