Baby Sewing Projects: Pregnancy and Nursing Pillows

So slowly but surely things are coming together in Cooper's room and I'm going to start sharing a few of the projects I've been working on.  I'll probably wait until after my shower in a few week to share pictures of his nursery so that I have a chance to finish it up.  But I've had a lot of fun working with my sewing machine again over the past few months.

This project is one of the very first ones I made after finding out I was pregnant.  I've had lots of people rave about the Snoogle pillow and how much it helps with sleeping and positioning for sleeping.  So when I found some patterns to make your own pregnancy pillow on Pinterest I thought I'd try them out.

I ended up going with this pattern from Mama Can Do It.  I think I somehow found a link to a free or reduced fee version of this pattern, but it only costs $10 full price so it's not a bad price when you compare it to the cost of a pillow.  And it has a pattern for the pregnancy pillow as well as a pattern for a nursing pillow (like a Boppy) and a cover so I got a lot out of the pattern.  And one of the best things is that she offers lots of tips for saving money, such as using old sheets to make the pillows instead of buying fabric.  So the only thing I had to buy was stuffing and I got a big bag at Walmart for less than $10.  So overall I spent less than $15 for a pregnancy pillow, a nursing pillow and 2 covers for the nursing pillow.  

 So here is the pregnancy pillow in all it's glory.  In all honesty though, this is pretty much where mine lives:

On the floor in the corner of our room.  It just has not been very helpful for me.  I thought since I have such a hard time sleeping when I'm not pregnant that it would help me get in better positions, but it really hasn't made me any more comfortable.  I've adjusted the amount of stuffing in it a few times to make it more/less firm but that didn't really help.  I even pulled it back out a few weeks ago when my hips were starting to hurt to see if would make a difference now that I'm further along--but it really just ends up being a nuisance to me.  Most likely it's because when I wake up I have a hard time going back to sleep already, so having to reposition with the pillow just adds to that and then I'm wide awake.  It does help some, but I haven't found it be helpful enough to make a difference for me.  It could also be because it is a knock off of the original snoogle, so it's not as good as if I'd just gotten the real thing!  But I'm mostly glad that I didn't spend very much on it.

In the original pattern, you make the nursing pillow as the top of the pregnancy pillow and then make a pillow case to hold it all so you can remove the nursing pillow.  Since I had enough sheet material, I made the full pregnancy pillow and then made a separate nursing pillow.  Before we found out baby's gender, we had planned to use navy as our main color in the nursery, so I made this cover for the pillow pretty early on: 

And then a few weeks ago Joann's had all of their nursery fabric on sale, so I made another cover so I'd have 2.  I added some snaps that weren't on the original pattern so that the cover stays tight around the pillow.

I'll be interested to try this out once Cooper is here to see if it works as well as an actual Boppy or if it's not quite as good.  But it was a fun project to work on to keep me busy during the early months of pregnancy when time was passing so slowly!