Marshmallow Pillow

I wanted to make a marshmallow pillow for my brother (because he’s a marshmallow). I’d never sewn a pillow before, but I thought it would probably be pretty simple to make—even a cylindrical one. I just needed to do a little math to figure out the area of the fabric I needed.

I was googling “How to sew a cylindrical pillow” and I saw some complaints about lumpy pillows, and someone suggested lining the fabric using batting. I thought this would probably help my pillow maintain its shape (especially since the fabric I got was on the thinner side).

After cutting out the material (and batting) to my desired size, I had some trial and error with adding the face. At first I thought I’d use embroidery floss and sew the face on…but that just didn’t work for me. I’m sure there’s a great way to sew on a face using embroidery floss, but since I have no experience sewing with embroidery floss, I decided I wanted to find something easier for me to do.

So then I decided to just use some scrap black fabric from my fabric stash and sew a face with that. That didn’t work well for me either because the fabric frayed so that was complicating things.

Finally, I just picked up some felt fabric at a thrift store, cut out the eyes and mouth the exact sizes I wanted, and then sewed them directly on the fabric. Felt doesn’t fray so I didn’t have to worry about sewing it in a special way. It was the simplest solution for me.

After the face was added to the rectangle fabric piece, I basted the batting to the fabric and sewed the pillow together. I didn’t do a perfect job on this pillow. I probably wasn’t as accurate with my cutting and sewing because I had some extra fabric on the rectangle portion and was too lazy to fix it (so I just made a couple of pleats in the back).

And I made another mistake. I accidentally sewed the top circle with the wrong side out—with the batting on the outside rather than the inside. By the time I noticed it, I was pretty much done with the pillow and didn’t think it was worth taking it all apart to fix. It isn’t very noticeable unless you’re looking for it—but it was a stupid mistake.

The finished pillow has a 13.5 inch diameter with a 17 inch height. I think it’s so cute—a big marshmallow with a happy face. Every time I look at it, it makes me smile. My brother liked it so it was a success.