Quick and Simple Puppy Pillow Case
Our puppy isn’t exactly housebroken yet. The first night we had him, he messed all over the pillow in his kennel. We needed something that could protect the pillow and be easily washable. The solution: flannel, hospital sheeting (rubber sheeting), and velcro. And a whole lot of estimating and zero measuring with anything resembling a measuring tape.
Caveat lector: this isn’t intended as a tutorial, rather as a show of my process on an off-the-cuff project. But, if you want to make your own and want clarification on anything, let me know in the comments or contact me.
Normally I’d put more thought into something like this, but basically, I looked up pillow case sizes online (on my phone, on the way to the fabric store), decided I needed about a square yard of sheeting, give or take and went to buy it.
My local JoAnn carries ~36″ wide medical sheeting. They had three bolts, and one seemed a couple of inches wider than the others, so I went with that one and bought 1 ¼ yards. Carl made a good argument that white (the only available color) would be a horrible mistake (hello, stains!), so we wandered to the red-tag aisle and picked up some quilter’s flannel as well. We bought the only dark color on clearance, which is a brown/orange paisley. Not my style, but I was going for cheap and simple. Maybe in the future I’ll make one to match the decor.
The medical sheeting I bought is the perfect width to fold in half and sew up the selvedges for the old pillow we were using (just a standard, if somewhat flat from use, bed pillow). I put the pillow on top of the folded sheeting, added a few inches and cut the excess off (maybe 7″ or so?).
Then, I cut the ~44″ wide flannel approximately 3″ longer than the sheeting, trimming both ends with pinking shears to stop fray. The medical sheeting doesn’t fray, so no need to do anything special there.
I layered the two fabrics so that the extra inches on the flannel were on one side, like in this diagram.
Then, I folded it in half with selvages touching, flannel to the inside with right-sides together and sewed up the bottom edge and selvage edge (leaving the top open).
I didn’t bother trimming off the flannel selvages, even though they’re about 2″ wider than the sheeting on each side, figuring it’ll keep it from fraying, and bulk isn’t really an issue.
I turned it right-side out, folded the excess flannel at the top edge into the pillow, then topstitched around to secure.
The last step was to sew velcro to the inside of the top edge, and voilá! Waterproof, puppy-safe pillowcase that can easily be thrown in the wash (in fact, I made two so that we have a spare). A zipper closure would be better (liquid can get in from the velcro side), but like I said, I was going for quick and simple and happened to have the velcro on hand, and this is good enough. The whole process took me about 30 min.
The rubber sheeting was very simple to work with. I just threw in an upholstery-weight needle (16/100), used the black poly Gütermann thread that was already on my machine from the vest project and had zero problems. Okay, one problem: the velcro I had isn’t meant for sewing, so the hook side split with my normal stitch length… I had to lengthen it as much as possible for that side. I just sewed three lines across it and it seems quite secure.
I like it and Buddy likes it. Sounds like a win to me. Now I have to come up with a fun use for the leftover bits. Any suggestions?
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