Spent most of yesterday afternoon cleaning my sewing room.

Instead of moving on to the guest room today like I thought I would, I enjoyed having a clean sewing room by taking care of a couple projects I wanted to finish. I made a tablecloth (simple; it was just hemming) of some Peanuts Thanksgiving fabric I bought a couple months ago. It felt like it would be kind of silly to let that fabric sit any longer (closer to the holiday) without using it.

I also made a couple sets of pillowcases using Peanuts themed winter fabrics (they are not strictly Christmas - scenes of ice skating and snowball fights.

What I did was to cut two 19" by 31" pieces for each pillowcase (keeping in mind which way I wanted the pattern to go). I sewed up three sides, and then, using my iron pressed up a 1/2 " turn up, then an additional 2 1/2 inches to make the hem. I sewed that up and turned the pillowcase right side out. I bought 2 1/2 yards of fabric; if you made the cases just a bit narrower (I use down pillows and hate having to sausage-stuff them into the cases) you could get away with 2 yards for two pillowcases. (Or if you cut them going the other direction, you could get 2 pillowcases out of 2 yards, or even a little less). I like having left over fabric, though.

I preshrunk the fabric first (this is very important) and washed it on the setting I would wash the finished pillowcases. I also ironed the fabric prior to cutting (also very important). I find that pressing the hem rather than merely pinning it causes a lot less instances of mis-sewing the hem.

Other sites with less-pithy instructions about making pillowcases:

Kid's Domain. (warning: annoying popup ad)
"Another Path's" version (has pictures, pattern is slightly different in that you cut a separate "hem" section and sew it on, which allows for you to also add piping or lace, similar to some commercial pillowcases).
"Mormonchic" (A site, I take it, for LDS women. This site has the best photos of the process and gives very detailed instructions, they also use the separate-hem-section method instead of my quick and lazy method).


I suppose you could use whatever fabric you wanted to make pillowcases. I've always used cotton quilting fabric because it's easy to work with and comes in a lot of different prints. (And I think things like satin would get uncomfortable fast). Don't use corduroy, though, unless you want your pillowcases to make headlines (humor, ar ar).