Knit a Giant Body Pillow Cover

I like to sleep with a body pillow and have done so for years. I’ve sewn a few different pillowcases for my pillow through the years, but I never would have thought to knit a cover for a body pillow.

But now that I’ve seen the knit body pillow from Lion Brand Yarn, I’m a little bit tempted to try it (though maybe not for sleeping).

The Ridge Line Body Pillow knitting pattern uses Lion Brand Cover Story yarn, which is a super bulky polyester yarn.

It is worked flat in one piece, from one short side down the length and up the other side. The project uses alternating sections of stockinette stitch and seed stitch.

The finished pillow cover comes out to about 50 inches/127 cm long and 36 inches/91.5 cm around. The basic Amazon body pillow is 20 by 54 inches (so about 51 by 137 cm) but you could adjust the length pretty easily if you want to use a standard pillow instead of stuffing your pillow form with polyfil.

That’s what I would do, and I might also add a zipper to the end instead of sewing the short ends together so that the cover is removable and washable. If you’ve never added a zipper to a knitting project before, I have a tutorial on the subject, and it’s actually pretty easy, though I do recommend hand sewing.

And of course you don’t have to use all the same color yarn if you don’t want to. If you have super bulky odd balls in your stash, feel free to mix it up with stripes. Or you can try holding a couple strands of worsted weight yarn together to make a mix that uses even more of your leftover yarns. Just remember the finished project will need to be washed in whatever way your most delicate yarn used can handle.

Whatever way you want to make it, you can grab the free pattern and/or a pattern kit with the yarn over at Lion Brand.

[Photo: Lion Brand]

There’s a lot to like about the Eloise Bandana from Katryn Seeburger. This cute little colorwork triangle can be worked as a bandana or kerchief size or a bigger shawlette.

It’s worked in two colors of fingering weight yarn so you can use whatever yarn you have in your stash and just make it as big as you can (since it is worked from the bottom up).

You can see the two sizes from the photo, and also two colorwork options: strawberries and lily of the valley.

But that’s not all the choices you have. In fact, there are 34 different charts you can choose from to knit onto your project. Some of the options include happy faces, a lobster, a pumpkin, a snail and a butterfly. There are cherries, peaches, tomatoes and radishes.

There’s even a blank square you can use to draw your own little design if you want to use something else. Or keep it blank and make it a plain checkerboard design.

And while both of these shawls use the same icons throughout, you could also use different designs throughout if you want. Say a fall version with a bat, pumpkin, leaf and acorn, or a summer beach theme with sailboat, fish, lobster and a bird? I keep suggesting four different icons because the larger size has four rows of squares, but the smaller has three, so you could do stripes of the same icon or alternate a couple of different ones, whatever you like.

Look through the finished projects on the Ravelry project page to see lots of different options, from rows to individual icons. There are also some projects that are smaller than the suggested size to make a smaller bandana. You could also keep going a make a bigger shawl working increases in the same way as you have been going.

Check out all the details and grab a copy of the pattern on Ravelry.

[Photo: Katryn Seeburger]

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