I’m still fairly new to crocheting, but I have greatly enjoyed it as one of my projects. One of my most recent projects was a gift for my cousin. She had some pillows that she wasn’t a super fan of, but they were good quality they just didn’t have a pattern on it that she liked. So I thought it might be a good idea to crochet a pillow cover for it.

I came across a cute idea of a pillow made of single crochets with the addition of stick figure trees, which my cousin really likes. This inspired me to make this idea my own!

So I watched a couple different tutorials for making crochet pillows and made my own.

Materials Used:

• Big Twist Yarn (White) from Joann Fabrics
• Big Twist Yarn (Black) from Joann Fabrics
• A 4.00 MM crochet hook
• Yarn Needle
• Clippers

— I got this crochet set off Amazon, which includes everything I’ve needed.

Here’s how I made it:

The pillow I made was to cover a 20×20 pillow.

I have to be honest, I wasn’t perfect in this pattern – I didn’t count my stitches and that meant that I eyeballed the two sides so they would line up.

I used the pillow to measure how many chains I needed and then as I created, I used a ruler to measure the size to make sure it would fit. I ensured that there was a little extra space on the sides and top just like if I was saving room for a seam around the pillow if I was sewing it.

All the stitches I created were single crochet, and this made the pillow pretty easy to make. It did however, take a decent amount of time to complete.

After you complete the first long chain, (which by the way, if I could do it all again I would make a foundation stitch to measure instead) I then turned my work and worked into the chain repeating this with single crochets until I had 1 panel big enough to cover 1 half of the pillow.

I made sure to leave tails on either ends of the work so I could use them to close the pillow.

Once the first half was finished, I began work on the other half. Then I had 2 matching 22″ (ish) x 22″ (ish) squares made up of all single crochets.

The Tree Pattern

To create the pattern, I was inspired by a technique called mud cloth embroidery – I got the idea from this post from make and do crew.

I used the yarn needle to sew black yarn from the back of the design through the front and I made a pattern of counting the single crochet stitches to create the trees on the front of the panel. This was fairly simple, but could become complicated if you don’t leave yourself enough yarn to work with for the trunk and branches of each tree.

I decided to put the pattern on only the front of the pillow so I ended up with 1 panel with the trees and 1 panel that was only white.

Close the Project

To close the project, I used a yarn needle. This is where more hand sewing comes into play.

Originally, I had used a sewing stitch of going over the end of the panels meeting and pushing the needle through the same side each time. However, when I opened the work to check out the seam, I realized that this wasn’t the best option.

Because of this, I wen’t over the same region and instead created sewn stitches that passed back and forth through the crochet to create straighter lines and a smoother seam. I definitely recommend this method if you are closing the pillow.

Just like when closing a regular pillow, I sewed 3 sides of the panels and then flipped the work so the seams were on the inside.

From here, I put the covering over the pillow I wanted to cover and closed the final side to close it off.

I wanted to try and get the final seam as similar to the other ones as possible so I used the yarn need to reach into the seam and close it off by reaching the inner panel and then the outer panel on the inside of the seam. It wasn’t flawless, but I made sure to put it on the bottom so it wasn’t very noticeable.

Hope you enjoy this really cute pillow!