As part of the spring cleaning that happened in our house last week, and to rid our space of the germs that have been plaguing us, I decided to wash my pillow. In the washing machine. And then dry it in the dryer. Which turned out to be not such a great idea, actually. The (fake plastic) stuffing did a little dance and ended up completely discombobulated.

Unable to bear the thought of tossing the pillow (which of course means adding it to my plastic collection), I slept on it like this for several nights and ended up with a sore neck. It was like laying my head down on a cinder block.

Not being the DIY queen that many of you are, sometimes I am oblivious to the obvious. Thankfully, there are other bloggers who can help. So, searching the Internet, I found instructions for using a fresh pillow case to create a newish pillow from the old stuffing. My pillow’s cotton case was in fine shape, so I was able to reuse it after fixing the stuffing inside.

I realize the following instructions will be super basic for those who sew and mend on a regular basis. But I assume (hope) that there is at least one other reader of this blog as domestically-challenged as I am who might benefit.

First, rip out one short seam with a seam-ripper. This is the seam-ripper I inherited from my grandmother. It’s plastic. I plan to write about plastic and sewing in a future post.

Remove the stuffing from the pillow and rearrange it properly. My stuffing, as I’ve mentioned, is plastic — 100% polyester batting. If your stuffing is made out of something else, your procedure might be different.

All I had to do was unfold it and place it back in the pillow case. Luckily, it had stayed pretty much in tact and simply needed rearranging.

Sew the pillow case back up (This part took me all night while I watched episodes of Reaper on DVD. I’m a very slow sewer.) and voila!

My neck feels so much better this morning.