Sweater Vest to Pillow!

My grandmother's birthday was coming up.  I wanted to give her something that actually meant something to her, rather than a gift card or something that filled a momentary void.  I wanted something that would last.

At the same time, my husband and I were considering selling our condo (update: we have decided to wait another year) and we were going through all of... well, everything; trying to downsize our clutter.  I stumbled upon my great-grandfather's (my grandmother's father) sweater vest.  My husband likes to wear these in the winter, and my grandmother offered this to us after my great-grandpa passed away two years ago. We've gone through two winter seasons now, and he (my husband) still has yet to wear it.  It's made of wool and kind of itchy to wear, so he wasn't sad when I suggested using this to make a gift for my grandma.

Here's a walk through of the mostly made-up process I went through...

Here is a picture of the vest, in it's original form.

I used a pillow in current use to measure how much I needed to cut.  This pillow is probably four years old, so it's been loved daily, as you can see.

I pinned the pillow inside the vest (the vest is still right-side-out), and cut above the line I made.  Depending upon the size of the pillow that you're using, you may need to cut more or less off of the sweater vest.  My pillow was 9"x9".  My line went just under the v-neck seam, but it was above the bottom of the sleeve. 

As you can see, part of the sleeve was included in the part of the sweater vest that I used.  I cut down both of the side stitches of the sweater.  

This made two indvidual pieces of fabric.

Then, apparently, I lost my mind and stopped taking pictures of my progress.  So I'll try to be as descriptive as possible.  Sorry!

I pinned the two pieces of fabric together, right sides together.  I pinned the left and right sides so that I would stitch in front of the sleeves.  I didn't want to have to deal with them, and honestly, my pillow was still going to fit without that extra width from the vest.

First, I sewed up the left side of the sweater, then across the top of the sweater, and back down the right side.  I did not stitch the bottom...because I had no idea how to close my pillow up.  How terrible was that??

I went to Hobby Lobby to get a pillow, and they had an invisible zipper that was the answer to my silly problem.  I'm terrible at hand stitching, so I try to avoid it at all cost.  An invisible zipper was perfect!  Still, no finished or up-close picture of my handywork.  Lame.

After I sewed the invisible zipper, I stuffed the new pillow into the cover (not that old loved on pillow from before).

Voila!  There you have it, a completed pillow.  As you can see from the picture above and the picture below, the pillow was very new and needed lots of fluffing.  Tibbs, my adorable kitty-cat, was sure to show you which pillow I'm talking about.  She wouldn't want you to get confused with the old red one or anything. Ha!

There you have it ladies & gentlemen!  I hope this tutorial was helpful for you!