Draw a Face, Make a Pillow

When my son went off to college we bought him a quilted mattress topper in an attempt to offset the discomfort of the dorm bed. Well, he's only a junior, but the stuffing in the mattress topper shifted and it no longer was able to serve its intended purpose. Nothing seems to wear today. I didn't want to just dump it in the trash, so the idea of making pillows with my five year old art class was born. I cut the mattress topper into sections, removed the stuffing and laundered the cover in hot water. I then sewed together three of the sides. I made the example pictured to show the children using permanent markers. We talked about how any face is made up of two shapes for the eyes, a shape for the nose and one for the mouth. Designing our pillow was not dissimilar from cutting a jack-o-lantern. We tried not to fixate on making the face look like anything in particular, so that there would be no worries about the outcome for the children who are not comfortable with their drawing skills. What they came up with was charming. We had a cat, a pig, a princess and some other wonderful characters that would be difficult to even classify. I brought them home to stuff and will miss seeing them lined up on my couch when I take them back to school.