Clash and Contradiction: Recycled Kid's Pajama Cushions

That little look of busy concentration is one of my favourites.

The sun has been bright, but there is still snow on the ground that has now mostly frozen to ice. Monday was a pajama day, we spent most of the day indoors in our pajamas, watching classic Winnie the Pooh, building with Legos, making lots of mess with various toys and eating Oreos. Never again on the Oreos, the resulting fallout with the little boy (i.e. Oreo Poop) was quite foul. We also got the rest of the artwork put up in Mikey's room.

Mikey is helping me do some hammering, using the drumstick from his music set. Just as noisy as a real hammer!

I'm reading a novel called Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell at the moment. It was published in 1848 and deals heavily with the struggles of the Manchester (U.K.) working classes in the 1830's-40's. It's a re-read, I had to study for college and did not enjoy it in the least, but now I'm finding it quite a good read. For some reason I am really enjoying British Victorian and early Edwardian literature at the moment, it's not something I ever used to particularly enjoy reading in the past, except for maybe the Sci-Fi/Horror/Gothic (Huxley, H.G. Wells, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker etc) but I've been plowing my way through quite a bit of it recently.

I got a project finished that has been laying around in my craft basket for a while. Mikey had some really cute pajamas that he grew out of a while ago. They weren't in good enough condition to save for a possible second baby, covered with stains on the front and with holes in the knees from an active little man, so I wasn't sure what to do with them. Then it hit me, I could cut them up and make them into something. So I give you, recycled kid's pajama cushions.

It's really simple to make them yourself. Cut out the motif if there is one, or if the fabric is a nice pattern you can just cut a square out of the back (ours were not stained on the back) or wherever the fabric is still in good condition. If you don't have a large area of undamaged fabric you could make a patchwork cushion! We also has some nice bright pajamas that were too small, but did not have patterns on them, so I used those to cut out the backing and pinned them together inside out.

Sew up the edges, I whizzed them through my little 10 Euro sewing machine, leaving a hole to pull them right side out and stuff them.

Then you want to stuff them with something, you could use the rest of the pajama fabric scraps if you like. I have an old ripped pillow laying around for such emergencies and I used fabric scraps as well as the stuffing from that.

If you like you can use the little snaps for embellishment too, I cut off the strip of fabric that had the snaps and sewed it onto the edge of one of mine, by hand because my sewing machine couldn't handle it, then I pulled it lightly to ruffle it a little and secured it firmly.

There you have it, I made two cute cushions from cute pajamas that I couldn't bear to part with!