Moroccan poufs are every where these days, you may have seen them here or here. I think they are such a fun accent for a room. I would buy one for every room in my house if I could… but I can’t because they are SO expensive, like $150+. I have thought about splurging on one because I think I could justify one as a piece of furniture… Then the other day I was at a fabric store and saw some vinyl samples and saw this poppy colored vinyl and thought it would make the perfect pouf. So I splurged and bought the vinyl at a whopping $5! I also bought some heavy duty thread and sewing needles because I figured my little sewing machine would need all the help it could get sewing the vinyl.

It ended up being a bit more stressful than anticipated. I think in my optimistic mind I thought I could use some $5 vinyl and turn it in to a $200 piece of accent furniture. But considering the total cost was about $15 to make, I am pretty happy with how it turned out.

To make:
I used a yard and a half of vinyl, but I think a thick canvas would work great also-I wanted it to look as much like a moroccan pouf as possible so I chose vinyl over a canvas. The canvas would probably be a lot easier to work with as opposed to vinyl or leather. I think I will try that next time. I used a heavy duty thread and leather sewing needle. I used white thread but think it would be better to buy coordinating thread since you see some of the stitching. My sewing machine worked like a champ, I was all worried for nothing.

1. Cut 10 pieces that look like this below. My pouf ended up being 14 inches high and 22 inches wide, so simply make these measurements smaller if you don’t want yours that big.

 2. Start sewing your pieces together. Put two pieces together right side of the fabric in. Sew a straight stitch along ONE side only. You are sewing from the top all the way to the bottom on one side-and DON’T SEW THE TOP AND BOTTOM TIPS (the 1 inch part).

 3. Sew five of your pieces together making sure to always sew just one side at a time and keeping the right side of the fabric in. It should look like this with the five pieces sewn.

 4. Sew your other five pieces together in the same way. Flip your two halves inside out so that the right side of the fabric is in.

 5. Place the other half of the pouf inside the first half. It should look like this with the right sides of the fabric in:

 6. Sew the two halves together. If you haven’t noticed by now, at this point you will see why working with canvas would be so much easier! Notice I have an area taped off. DON’T SEW the taped area OR the TOP of the pouf-you haven’t been sewing the tips of any other pieces, don’t start now 🙂

 7. Because you didn’t sew the taped area, you have an open hole where you can turn the pouf right side out. This hole should be big enough to stuff towels and blankets in which will hold the pouf’s form.  You can use stuffing, cut up foam, t-shirts you don’t want your husband to wear anymore, etc. I used about 3 old towels and three twin sized blankets-it sounds like a lot, which it is, it took more than I expected to stuff it. *Tip: while stuffing, have some sort of method to it. I wrapped one of the thicker blankets around the outside and folded a blanket for the top so that the shape looked nice. If you just throw things in there willy nilly it will have bumps and bulges on the sides and top-this will be more apparent with a thinner fabric. Also, you can test to see if you have enough stuffing by sitting on it if you sink down too much, stuff more in there.

9. I noticed that you could see a lot of the stitching on the sides of the pouf. So you could either do a hand stitch over it (if it’s thinner fabric) or take the easier route and just use fabric glue and glue some decorative string from the fabric store. Or take the easiest route and just leave it 🙂

Now, if you want you can do this to the top of the pouf also and have both ends look the same. You can stop and be done with your pouf and consider yourself a success that you just saved a lot of money by making a pouf instead of buying one… but if you are willing to get maybe one more gray hair in the effort to make your pouf look even more like the moroccan poufs, then you can continue with the steps.

11. For the top of the pouf I tried to get a little fancy. If you want you can get fancy with the sewing and just fit more pieces in instead of just the 10 basic pieces from step 1. I just didn’t want to worry about sewing all of these tiny pieces of vinyl together. So instead I cut 10 little arrowhead shaped pieces that would fit to cover the seams at the top of the pouf. I used fabric glue to glue them on. Because it was vinyl it was very time consuming to get the vinyl to lay right and let the glue dry. I think the fabric would have laid by itself easier if it was a thinner fabric, like a canvas. In the picture below you can see how I glued the string on. It was necessary to use a thicker string to cover the seams.

And I think the hard work of gluing on the extra pieces paid off. It looks so much prettier than the bottom don’t you think!