For headache or stress relief, or just a nice, long nap, an eye pillow weighted with natural buckwheat and sewn from soft fabric is just the thing you need to help you really relax. You can fill your eye pillow with your favorite herbs, sew it from silk or organic cotton, store it in the freezer to keep it soothingly chilly, and make a few extras to give as gifts later on. Here’s how:
To make your own eye pillow, you’ll need a coffee mug or Mason jar lid to help you make a template. Trace one circle on a piece of paper, then trace another circle that touches it. Draw a smooth, gentle curve to connect the two circles, as you can see in the above piece cut using my own template. You can also rearrange the circles closer together or further apart, or choose larger or smaller circles to trace, to customize your own template to your liking. When the template is drawn the way that you like it, draw it again outside the entire perimeter of the original template by about 1/2″ to accommodate a seam allowance and top stitching, and cut it out. Use this template to cut two pieces of fabric for your eye pillow. With right sides together, sew around the eye pillow with any sturdy stitch that you like, leaving approximately 3″ unsewn on one long side so that you can fill your pillow with goodness. Clip all the curves (Don’t clip over your stitching!), then turn the eye pillow right sides out–I use a dull colored pencil to help me push out all the curvy seams–and iron to press. While you’re ironing, crease the raw edges of the open part of the seam to the inside and press them down to make it easier to top stitch the pillow closed later. Next » Once the eye pillow is right sides out, top stitch around the perimeter, excepting only the open part of the seam. Later, when you close that seam with top stitching, too, all the stitches will match. Fill the eye pillow with buckwheat and dried herbs. Lavender is a common choice, although I use dried peppermint in my family’s eye pillows, because it’s my most soothing scent. You won’t want to fill your eye pillow more than halfway full, probably, both because an overstuffed eye pillow won’t drape well, and because it will become really difficult to machine sew shut. Pin the open seam, then sew it shut, using the same stitch and thread that you used to top stitch the rest of the perimeter of the pillow. You can store your eye pillows along with your rice pillows in the linen closet. However, although rice pillows are often heated before they’re used, eye pillows are often chilled, so you can also store them right in the refrigerator or freezer. In a pinch, a chilled eye pillow is also excellent first-aid for bumps and bruises and sprains.
