Yesterday dh and I needed to go to an office at the bottom of Karmiel, and while we were there, did a little bit of shopping in the area.  We saw some pillows marked at 30% off, and looked to see how much they were – just 70 shekels each after the discount!

To buy ten pillows for our family, this would have cost us a hefty 700 shekels.  And this reminded me that I didn’t share with you about my pillow making adventure.

For about seven weeks after arriving here in Israel, we didn’t have pillows.  Everyone used some item of clothing pushed into a pile under his head at night, and though it wasn’t ideal, it was manageable.  I wanted to buy some, but the choices I found weren’t great: the second hand store had cheap pillows for just 5 shekels each, but I had no desire to let any of my family members rest their heads on the majority of the pillows there (I did find two good ones, though).  Then I saw some new pillows that were just 15 shekels each at the bargain store, but were so flat that I knew after using them for a night we’d hardly feel there was anything under our heads!  And lastly are the higher quality pillows like those we saw on sale yesterday, which is really the kind of pillow I wanted.

Dh isn’t yet working, and we have to be conservative about our expenditures, so spending hundreds of shekels on something like pillows, that are nice but you can’t really call them essential, didn’t seem prudent.

Right around the time I was checking out the pillow purchasing options, I passed a leather couch set out on the curb that was being given away.  The cushions you would sit on were ripped, but the back pillows were in perfect condition.  I passed it, thinking it was too bad there was nothing I could do with them.  And passed the same couch a second time a little later that day, and then the third time I passed it the same day, a light went off in my head!

Since the cushion covers were leather, it was safe to assume that no one had drooled on the inner cushion, wet it, or done anything else that would make it disgusting.  I realized I could use the inner cushion to make pillows with – they were good quality cushions with good quality stuffing.

Dd10 and ds9 were with me, so each of us grabbed one – two large ones from the back of the sofa, and one smaller one from the side of the sofa.  (I didn’t take the second small one because the zipper was opened a couple of inches, and I didn’t want to worry if anything could have gotten in.)  When we got home, I saw that they were constructed differently than I had anticipated, and my first idea for recreating them wouldn’t be as easy as I thought.

I found a couple of sheets we had been given that were in the give away bag, and started cutting, using the material in a way to minimize the sewing I’d need to do (ie the fold of the sheet became the length of the pillowcase on one side).  One was a crib sheet, which I turned into two matching pillow cases.  A twin sheet yielded four matching pillowcases, and the inner casing from the original couch cushions became the remaining three pillow cases.  I unfortunately couldn’t bring my sewing machine along when we moved, which would have made this project super fast.  But I compensated by doing a running stitch by hand to quickly sew the material together, and I was able to do this with the kids around while interacting with them, so though it took some time, it wasn’t a big time sink.

Once I had a case closed on three sides, I let the littles fill them with foam. They had fun with this, though their enthusiasm did lead to an extra mess!  After we stuffed in the amount we wanted, I sewed each pillow shut.  It’s especially nice that since this is industrial quality stuffing, it’s soft but denser than what I’ve seen in craft store so these pillows won’t turn into flat pancakes anytime soon!

By reclaiming and recycling materials that were available to us, and equally importantly, by looking at those materials with the willingness to think creatively, “What can I do with this?”, we now have nine new pillows that didn’t cost us a penny.  Not only that, I saved the inconvenience of traveling on the bus to get them and bring them home, which would have been significant with the amount of pillows we needed.

Avivah

(This is part of Make Your Own Monday and Frugal Friday.)