Trick or Cheap

Well folks this may be it.....the cheapest and easiest little couch spruce up EVER! I have been struggling with finding new pillows for our couch. Let me backstep.....I have a major pillow addiction....as in pillow intervention, straight up TLC Hoarder's style. So I was pretty sure of two things: 1.) I needed to recycle pillows we already own. 2.) I needed to buy or make pillow covers that were extremely cheap. Hence the infamous struggle of creating something on the thrifty budget while giving it a polished, luxe look. I am recently inspired by moorish tiles and trellis prints on everything from wall stencils to curtains. Since my eye is already trained to pick these prints out, I happened to notice really cute re-usable grocery totes at the Christmas Tree Shop. At $1.00 a pop, I grabbed a couple in a kelly green trellis print and one in a cute chocolate brown floral. I had every intent of using these puppies as grocery totes. Then as my crazy mind often does, it started cracking with thoughts of the trellis print totes being the print I wanted for the new toss pillows. Long story longer, I got home and whipped out my old Singer sewing machine and a few old throw pillows from our basement storage,

I simply placed the pillow insert into the tote and stitched the open end closed. You could even glue on a velcro closure if you were a little shy with sewing. Once the side was closed up, I snipped off the handles and......

Each pillow took about 2 minutes to make from start to finish so this was easy on the wallet and the clock.. I repeated with the brown floral one as well.

Lastly I had some left over fabric from the Big Boy Redo project and one pillow insert left so I created an additional pillow for the couch.

I love the contrast between the colors and the prints.To create this pillow, I just folded the fabric in half and stitched the two lengths with the sewing machine to create a tote. I then slid the insert in and hand stitched the opening.

 I love that this project cost $3 in totes and about $2 from the leftover fabric. That's $5 for 4 pillows. Yowza! You can find fabric totes everywhere and what a better way to experiment with some different prints! Other ideas for these cheap totes would be to frame them and create a wall display. Imagine each of the prints in a chunky white frame set in a group of 3 in your foyer. Or maybe the prints create a back drop in a shadow box. Bottom line, don't be afraid to re-purpose something that your eye likes!