DIY Sherpa Tree Pillow

This beautiful DIY Sherpa Tree Pillow is a fun and easy sherpa yarn project that requires no special skills or tools.

My babes wanted me to make her a sherpa yarn pillow.

Sherpa yarn? What in tarnation is that? I asked her to explain, and she told me it’s a fuzzy sort of yarn that is all the rage these days.

Sherpa yarn. Huh.

They could have named it anything, really.

It was soft. It was cozy. It could have been called “Snuggle” or “Winternap.”

But instead, the textile engineers at Collins & Aikman, when brainstorming names for the faux-shearling fabric they’d just developed in the early 1960s, decided to call it “Sherpa.”

It was a good name. The sherpa ethnic group inhabit the mountains of Tibet and Nepal, and if anyone knows warm clothing, it’s them! And certainly it was more meaningful than, say, calling it “Han” after the largest ethnic group in the world or “Toto” after the smallest, though I must admit that “Toto fur” or Toto fabric” has a glorious ring to it!

Imagine the success “Toto Tops” would have had in the late 60s and early 70s!

But now that I think on it, “Han fabric” could have yielded amazing 70s one-piece leisure suites brilliantly named “Han Solos!”

For those wondering, the Han are a Chinese ethnicity numbering about 1.5 billion people – that’s 20% of the world population! The Toto, by comparison, number about 2000 and reside in a small village in West Bengal in Eastern India. Coincidentally, they’re a geographic stone’s throw from the Sherpa people living just to the northwest.

What does all this have to do with the Sherpa tree pillow I’m going to show you?

Absolutely nothing!

But I’m a curious fellow, and I may have been an etymologist in another life. These things just interest me.

But to sum it up in language the younger generation would cotton to:

“Fun fact! Sherpa fabric was developed in the 60s and named after the Sherpa ethnic group in the Himalayas!”

Brevity in writing was never my thing.

So enough yappity yapping – let’s make a pillow!

Oh, and before I forget, some of you may remember the shag tree pillow I made a couple of years ago.

This sherpa tree pillow is similar but actually much easier!

So if you were on the fence back then, you can jump right in with this one.

Don’t worry, the Snuggle fabric will cushion your landing!

Sherpa Tree Pillow VIDEO Tutorial

Watch our short and fun video below for an overview of our sherpa tree pillow before you read the detailed step-by-step tutorial.

DIY Sherpa Tree Pillow Tutorial

Step 1 – Prepare the cover

First I pulled the pillow from its cover and then laid the cover on my worksurface.

I gathered my four colors. I planned to make five trees, so two would share a color.

Step 2 – Make some triangles (and call them trees)

I started by outlining a tree-ish triangle smack dab in the middle of the pillow cover. Avoid the temptation to span the cover top to bottom with your tree. Once the insert is stuffed back in, your tree would have a severe curve.

I put a dab of hot glue in the three corners to lock the shape on the pillow cover.

I snipped the umbilical and then glued down the sides.

I moved on to the next yarn and made another triangle next to the first.

At this point I was feeling like a creative Tyrannosaurus, so I showed Handan my progress. Instead of the kudos, confetti and congratulations I was expecting, my pillow-making efforts were met with a generous round of indifference.

She glanced at the sherpa triangles and then back up to me. She raised her eyebrows and simply said, “Yeah?”

I looked at my triangles. They looked like a majestic and magical forest!

I looked at my babes. “You’re going to fill them in, right?” She said.

Fill them in??

“Yeah. Yes. Yes, of course, my babes!” I said. “I was just showing you the colors.

Step 3 – Fill them in

I laid more yarn in concentric triangles until I had the first triangle entirely filled with sherpa yarn.

When the corners got a little tight as I approached the center, I used a pointy wooden skewer to keep the yarn snug against the preceding layer.

Step 4 – Make more trees!

Okay, this next one wasn’t exactly sherpa yarn, but I loved the color, so I included it.

Fun fact! Growing up, our living room sofa was this exact color, and it was made of a similar crushed velvet sort of fabric. Great sofa, very comfortable. Spent a lot of nights sleeping on it when it got shunted to the basement in the 80s to make way for its soft-green replacement.

One on each end with the same color yarn, and this sherpa tree pillow was finished!

Let’s have a look at my filled-in masterful creation!