Upcycled Pillowcases

 
About a month ago, I had a weird feeling in the middle of the night that my foot was caught in my sheet. Well, it wasn't a dream. We wore our sheets plum out. When I got up in the morning and looked, there was a 12 inch rip in the fitted sheet. We've had these sheets for maybe 15 years. They were the first flannel sheets that I purchased and here in Wisconsin, I keep flannel sheets on the beds for at least six months.

No doubt about it, the bottom sheet had bit the dust. It was pretty thin all over. I'm surprised I never noticed this while doing laundry. However, the flat sheet still had a lot of life left in it. I hated to throw that away. After looking at it, I decided to make the sheet into pillowcases. We have four pillows on all the beds in the house. So I'm always looking for an extra set of pillowcases. So often when you buy a sheet set, regular sized pillowcases come in the set, even though you're buying queen sized sheets. I was able to make these queen size and I have enough left to make another set.

 

Here's the flat sheet that still has a lot of life left in it.

For the first pair of pillowcases, I'm going to take advantage of that band that's at the top of the sheet. This will save me some time. A nice clean finish all ready for me.

I need to carefully lay the sheet on the cutting mat. There is a lot of width here so I tried to smooth out the wrinkles as best I could. I am cutting slightly larger than I need to so if there are a few wrinkles and the cut is wonky, that's ok. We're going to even this out right away. I'm going to measure down 33 inches and cut. So my piece will measure something like 50 inches by 33 inches.

I take my cut portion and I now fold it the opposite way. This will be along the longer length. I hope your following me! I'm cutting this in half.

You can see the two layers here.

Here is one half, the measurement is 27x33. You can see the band on the left side of the picture and the other end is nice and neat. I retrimmed this.

I was going to do a French seam and kind of forgot. I pinned right sides together. With French seams, you start with wrong sides together. Oh well, this method will work it just won't be a pretty on the inside.

 We are going to take this to the machine and stitch a 1/2 inch seam.

 Now I'm going to trim. Because I was thinking I was doing a French seam, I trimmed a little too close. Otherwise, you should just trim to about 1/4 inch. My seam allowance is more like 1/8 inch.

After I trim the seam allowance, I zig zag down the seam. This will keep the fabric from unraveling. Now all that's left is to turn your pillowcases right side out. Now I need to go back and make two more out of the rest of the sheet.