Dollar store placemat, reclaimed!

There's a Family Dollar store just up the street from where we live, and it's so handy when I need to pick up cheapy items for around the house. Shortly after we moved in last year, I bought a bunch of these golden-colored placemats; at $1 each, I couldn't beat the price and they were a perfect match for the color scheme in our dining room.

But after using them for awhile, they started to look a little worse for wear, and I decided to toss them in the washing machine. They came out cleaner, but whatever was inside of them to keep them stiff had disintegrated in the wash and wrecked their original flat shape:

This made them totally unusable as placemats. And even though they only set me back a buck each, I hated to throw them in the garbage, so I stuck them in my craft stash, hoping that some upcycling inspiration would eventually strike.

I've been wanting to buy or make some cushions for our dining room chairs for some time, and I recently started wondering if I might be able to reclaim our ruined placemats for that purpose. This weekend I decided to monkey around with them and see if my idea would work.

First, I stuck some pins in where I thought they should be hemmed to fit our chairs, and I lopped off the extra fabric:

Next, I used my seamripper to take out some stitches so I could turn the fabric in onto itself:

Then I turned the fabric in, and pressed the seam:

Then I stuffed it with polyfill, and pinned it for sewing:

Then I stitched it up, covered up some buttons and sewed them into the middle, attached ribbons for tying it to the chair, and here it is!

There's actually a whole website devoted to crafting with dollar store items; you can check it out right here. Happy (cheap!) crafting!