Secret Pocket Pillow

I had a friend coming over from Oregon who I’d never met in person before (though we had known each other online for a few years) so of course I had to make her something. My friend loves perfumes and Victorian flower symbolism, and she’s generally a very private person so I decided to make her a sachet pillow with an embroidered front and a secret pocket for hiding personal treasures.

This was going to be fairly simple project so of course I put it off until last minute. I ended up spending the night before I needed to drive hours to where we’d be meeting for the Big E sewing instead of sleeping (and thus the photos do not have great light quality).

This whole thing of course was going to be not just a pillow, but a sachet pillow with a hidden pocket inside. I didn’t want just a pocket on the outside of the pillow, I wanted a truly secret pocket. After no luck finding another example of this online, I designed my own pattern. I am no experienced pattern maker, but luckily this was essentially a rectangle within a rectangle with a flap to hide it. I decided to make it look like there was a pillow case with an opening on the back side (rather than on the side – such as you would find on many decorative pillows). There would in fact only be one flap, and by turning the flap inside out you would find the opening to the pocket along the side seam of the pillow. I wasn’t sure how to keep the pillow stuffing from squeezing the pocket so much that it was unusable. In the end I got some heavy upholstery fabric for the inner pocket and decided to A) not stuff the pillow too much and B) hope for the best.

After asking my friend if she had any flowers in her book that had to do with courage or strength, I chose a fennel flower for the front. Her book I believe marked the meaning as “brave in the face of adversity,” which I liked very much. I was meaning originally to put mistletoe as well, but after sketching out the pattern of the fennel I felt that would be too cluttered.

The stems are attempted stem stitch. To this day I still struggle with that one, but this being an early project the stitches were especially bulky. It probably didn’t help that at that time I only knew to use tapestry needles, which I’ve since learned will make even the simplest stitch bulky (good for textured bark, bad for delicate stems). The flowers are french knots, which I love to use whenever I can. This was the first time I learned how to use an away knot. It does use up more thread of course, but for things like floating french knots it’s a great way to start your stitching. It wasn’t until later that I learned a few other ways of starting for when your design will hide the anchor stitches (and yes I am entirely aware that these may not be the proper names for things).

I’m not a fast stitcher so even this simple front took some time. Once it was finally was done, I was onto the tricky task of making and assembling the pillow.

I made the inner pocket first with velcro to keep it closed and keep the contents inside, then moved onto the back. The plan was to have three layers that were all sewn permanently together. The first was the inner pocket, then an inner lining (to protect the other fabrics from the sachet contents, and also to give the thin cotton a nice, even base color), and then the outside. My friend likes purple and pink, so I chose those colors for the back with the flap. (In the picture, the pink is sewn to the purple only along two seams of the pillow.) I tried to make a button hole for a button. For some reason I can’t figure out how to use the button hole function on my sewing machine, so I sort of fibbed one. It came out more or less OK.

The last part was stuffing it. I mixed a carp ton of dried rosemary with a few drops of jasmine essential oil. I did not realize how pungent jasmine really is. It smelled nice, but pretty soon the fragrance was giving me a headache. As I started stuffing the pillow it became pretty clear that I didn’t have enough to fill the sachet only with the rosemary, so I mixed it with some pillow stuffing to give it a bit of body.

In the end the secret pocket pillow was mostly a success. My worries about the pocket collapsing were well founded. Under-stuffing and using stiff fabric definitely helped, but I think if I were to try this again in the future I would try to have something even stiffer for the pocket sides so the pillow stuffing doesn’t force it closed. I’d also need to adjust the length of the flap, as it was far too long and the sewn sides made it hard to turn inside-out to reveal the pocket.

I did give it to my friend and she reportedly liked it very much – strong scent included.