How to Make a Zippered Pillow Sham

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Pillow shams add style, color and elegance to your bedroom set. A pillow sham is also a great beginner-friendly project and an easy way to practice some basic sewing skills. Adding a zipper allows you to easily remove the sham when you need to wash it, but it also keeps the pillow securely inside the sham. In this two-part video series, we'll teach you how to sew your own zippered pillow sham. Scroll down to watch remaining videos.

Materials List:

2 Complementary Home Décor Fabrics of Your Choice
Tex 45 or Tex 70 Thread — Choose a Color
#5 Single Non-Locking Zipper Pull (Molded Tooth Chain) — Choose a Color
#5 Continuous Molded Tooth Zipper Chain — Choose a Color

Tools List:

Sewing Machine
Sailrite^® Edge Hotknife
Scissors, Straightedge, Measuring Tape
Marking Tool

Cutting the fabric for your pillow sham

In the first video, we walk you through measuring, patterning and cutting the fabric for your pillow sham. We’re making our sham with two different fabrics — a striped fabric for the sham body and a coordinating solid fabric as a frame. Using two coordinating fabrics is a great way to bring more color to your décor and add some interest to your bedroom set. Watch this video to learn how to cut, measure and sew the sham, including how to miter your fabric corners.

In this next video, we'll show you how to finish sewing your pillow sham. From here, we pick up with sewing the contrasting-color frame to the body panels. Once the sham is sewn, you’ll add a continuous zipper to one side of the sham. If you’ve never sewn a zipper, our video tutorial shows the whole process so there’s no guesswork on your part.

Sailrite is your go-to resource for all things zippers! We stock a full and diverse inventory of zipper components: separating zippers, continuous zipper chain lengths, zipper pulls and sliders, and zipper top and bottom stops. We’re proud to stock both Lenzip^® and YKK^® brand zipper components. Both brands are giants in the industry, known for quality parts that last. Our Lenzip supply is by far our most robust zipper offering, with a wide variety of finished, separating and continuous zipper styles, colors and sizes, as well as sliders and pulls in a multitude of colors and styles to choose from. Think of Sailrite as your trusted zipper supplier.

Once the zipper is installed, there’s just a bit of additional sewing to do and then you’re done! Now you’ve got a great-looking pillow sham to dress up your bedroom set. We hope you enjoyed this pillow DIY. Be sure to check out all our other pillow and cushion how-tos by searching "pillow" or "cushion" on Sailrite.com.