How to Repair Damaged Throw Pillows - Mend Holes and Piping Edges

 

Sometimes the inevitable happens, your nicest throw pillows on the sofa get chewed up by your best furry friend.  When I first glanced at these pillows, I thought to myself, how will I fix this damage? The piping was exposed and some of it was missing. There were holes and no way to join the fabric together.  I would need to extra fabric to mend the damage.  Since there was no extra fabric for these pillows and I didn’t want to just throw any kind of fabric on them, I used something else.  

I decided to use strips of the fabric from the seam allowance inside the pillowcases.  I cut as many strips as I could, stitched the strips together, and pressed fusible interfacing underneath the strips to reinforce.  The end result was a long and wide strip of “repair” fabric I could use to fix the holes and piping.   

Before and after of the worst corner damage.

This corner had the most damage.  Most of the fabric torn, holes and piping missing.

The other pillow had minor damage at the corner.

Here are the strips I cut from the seam allowance.  They came from the inside of the pillowcase.  I cut as close as I could to the stitching. I wanted to get as much fabric as I could.

I started by zig zag stitching the strips together.  I put them together edge to edge, no overlapping.

Here’s my last strip I’m adding.

I now took my wide strip of fabric I made and ironed on some fusible interfacing to the back or wrong side of the fabric.  This will help reinforce and strengthen the strip.

I zig zag stitched the wide strip to the interfacing to strengthen it even more.  I didn’t want to risk anything falling apart.

The strip is ready to use now.  I start by attaching it to the piping piece.  I needed to re-create the end piece that was chewed up.

I changed over to my darning foot so I can perform free motion stitching.

Close up.

Here, I cut away the excess. Now, I have an extension piece attached.

Here is the other side of what it looks like.

Now its time to fix one of the holes.

I took a piece of the strip fabric...

Placed it underneath the hole.

I darned the piece together to fill the void.

Same thing here - We have another U shaped hole.  

I put the piece of strip fabric underneath...

Pinned it together.

Darned it to fill that voided hole.

I then cut the excess off.

On this piece of cording, I noticed it was too short because it was chewed away by the puppy. 

I didn’t have cording on hand, so I took a piece of cotton ribbon and started to wrap it around the end of the cord.  You can always use alternative materials that add the same amount of bulk. 

Wrapping it around the cord…

Wrapping a little tighter...

Pinned it in place.

Stitched the piping near the cording.

Stitched the piping back into place.  I had to switch over to a zipper foot because this was thick piping.  I took the pic before all of this – I thought to myself, I could really use my zipper foot, this is too hard with the standard foot!  😬

Here you can see I overlapped the piping piece ends.  My plan is to sew them together, so they are joined, yet overlapped. I’ve seen this with some pillows before.  This was the corner with the most damage.

I am now using the zipper foot to sew the edges down with the piping underneath.   There was a lot of heavy fabric here.  I needed a heavy duty needle and steady hands.

Finished!  Here is the pillow corner that had minor damage. 

Here is the pillow corner that had the most damage. When you look at the pillows up close, the darning stitches are visible.  I chose a soft brown as my main thread because I thought it would blend best with all the earth tones. Good news is you when you arrange the pillows back on the sofa, you can always put the repaired side towards the bottom if you wish.

I hope you found this tutorial helpful! Thanks again for stopping by!

😉🧵💖