Leather pillows are an easy to way to upgrade your home decor in almost any room. They are classic and look great with almost any style of decor. It can be expensive to purchase a leather pillow, but it is easy and inexpensive to make one yourself!
How do you make a DIY leather pillow? You can make a leather pillow out of a thrifted jacket for less than $10. All you need is a jacket, sewing machine and a few other supplies to make a leather pillow for your home. This DIY leather pillow tutorial is so easy that anyone can make one!
How To Make A DIY Leather Pillow Out Of A Thrifted Jacket
s I’m tackling the One Room Challenge, one of the things I really needed/wanted for our master bedroom was new pillows. I have been loving the look of leather pillows lately, but they can be quite pricey. Since I’m working with a super small budget, I decided to make a DIY Leather Pillow out of a $7 thrift store jacket. I love how it turned out and it was so easy to make! Keep reading to learn how to make a DIY leather pillow yourself!
It’s no secret that I love to DIY my own home decor to make it look great for a lot less. These giant DIY Cactus Art prints are just one example of one my recent DIY home decor adventures. When I spotted a leather jacket at a local thrift store’s 1/2 of sale, I decided to get it and turn it into a pillow cover. Once I got it home and started deconstructing it, I realized it actually wasn’t 100% leather, but it still has the look and feel of it. This tutorial would of course work just the same with real leather if you can get your hands on a cheap old jacket!
Materials Needed To Make A DIY Leather Pillow
Here is what you will need:
- Leather Jacket
- Pillow Insert
- Sewing Pins
- Sewing Machine
- Thread
- Sewing Ruler
- Rotary Cutter (or scissors)
1. Find a leather jacket at a thrift store – the bigger, the better.
Here is the “leather” jacket that I found. The key is to use a very large jacket. This was a women’s 4X, so it was plenty big enough to turn into a pillow! I ended up washing mine since I found out it wasn’t real leather, but you would have to research how to clean leather if you felt like your thrift store coat was dirty or gross!
2. Deconstruct your jacket. It’s pretty easy to cut the lining from the exterior layer.
3. Next, cut the arms off so that you just have the back portion.
You will need some of the fabric from the arms and front later, so don’t throw it away just yet!
4. Next, you will need to cut a square according to the size of your pillow insert.
The easiest way to do this is by using a rotary cutter, cutting mat and clear strait edge ruler. You could always do it with scissors and measuring tape though!
5. Now you have a square for the front part of the pillow.
The back of the pillow is going to be an envelope style, so you can achieve this by piecing some rectangles of fabric together.
I used the hem of the jacket so that it was one less thing for me to sew. The top part is larger than the bottom part, but that’s totally fine. I had to sew a few pieces together to make it the size that I needed. The main thing is that you have 2 pieces of fabric that are going to overlap on the backside of the pillow, creating the envelope.
6. With right sides together, pin one part of the back to the front.
7. Now lay the other part on top, overlapping the back pieces so that it fits the front square. Sew all the way around the edges and turn right side out.
8. Place your pillow insert inside the pillow cover.
The back envelope of fabric should cover the pillow insert nicely.
Flip it over, and you are finished!
I’m definitely going to be on the hunt for inexpensive leather jackets at the thrift store so that I can make more of these! This leather pillow is going to look so cute in our bedroom for the One Room Challenge.
Check out my other One Room Challenge Projects!
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