Neck Pillow Tutorial

The second week in July we are going on vacation! I am SOO excited! Now that we live in Texas we fly to most of our vacation destinations...but not this time. This time we are doing a good old fashioned road trip and I am excited...sorta! I love going on road trips with Greg...the open road, singing along to old-school DCTalk, talking, reading books, taking random photos of the side of the road. Ahh....memories! We used to make lots of trips from St. Louis to Milwaukee and Indy.

But alas, a LOT has changed since those days of care free road-tripping. We added two kids to the mix. The longest road trip we took these kids on was driving back to San Antonio from Milwakee via two days in St. Louis, but my mom was with us...and Micah was pretty little...so he slept most of the way. As I said before, things are different now. I know the kids will do great and we're going to have a great time but I'm planning a lot of things for the trip and planning on making it successful.

One thing in my plans to make the trip successful was to make little neck pillows so that if and WHEN the kids fall asleep they don't break their necks in the process. I figured, how hard can it really be to make a little curved pillow? Well, it wasn't all that hard actually. And here's my little tutorial to prove that anyone with a little basic sewing knowledge can make a neck pillow too! Because really my sewing knowledge is BASIC!

Here's the end product...but how did I get there? (Isn't he handsome?)

I started by drawing my shape on the wrong side of the fabric and pinned right sides of both fabrics together.

I then sewed around my line using the line as my guide.
Then I cut the shape out, about 1/4 inch from the sewn line. I found it MUCH easier to sew the shape and then cut it out rather than trying to sew the already cut shape. It's a good thing I have to do things twice because it gives me an opportunity to try it a different (and hopefully easier) way.
Turn the pillow right side out...I added this ribbon to Naomi's because originally I was going to use white chenile on the front but forgot so the ribbon is to differentiate between Micah's and Naomi's...plus I think it's cute!
Here are the two pillow forms waiting to be stuffed. They look the same basically but I made Naomi's a little wider at the bottom.
I stuffed the pillows pretty tight and then sewed a line near the top so that stuffing would stay tight in the bottom. I didn't fill the part between the lines too full because I didn't want it to push their heads forward.

Here are the pillows in action (she's faking it)...
(he's not).

Hope you enjoyed this little tutorial. If something isn't clear let me know and I'll try to clarify. Let me know if you make one...I'd love to see it!