Valentines Day Decor

I love Valentines Day, its always been one of my favorite Holidays. I love the pinks, reds, hearts, cookies, candies.... or maybe that's because its close to my birthday!

Even though I love the Holiday I have not decorated much for it this year.

I finally got around to putting away my Christmas pillows and made a new Valentines pillow. For some reason I didn't take any in between pictures, but this one was pretty straight forward. I cute 9 hearts by hand (no Silhouette this time, I know!!!) I used some Under Wonder and ironed them on, and then outlined the hearts with my sewing machine. (Don't look, but I am learning how to sew so my lines aren't great!!!) The 3 middle heart's are made from a Target dish towel.

I also put together a little valentines day decor on our mantel. I really like the simple love frame (made with the same Target dish towel!!!) and I think its going to have a permanent place in my craft room - since my craft room colors are red, black and turquoise!

From dish towels to pillow in 5 minutes....

Thursday night when I was having craft fail after craft fail I needed a project that I knew I could not mess up on.... a few weeks ago at Target I picked up two of these awesome dish towels - I was not sure what I would use them for but I knew they would not be used in the kitchen...

I folded the dish towel in half and cut a bit off of the bottom - I wanted a smaller pillow - I then sewed the pillow leaving room for stuffing! It took 5 minutes and it turned out EXACTLY how I planned!! The colors match my craft room perfectly so I thought it would be a nice pillow to keep on my chair for my hour and hours of crafting!
When Little Man found this pillow he instantly thought it was for him and moved it into his room and curled up with it and his blanket... so I might have to make him another small Little Man sized pillow!

Scrabble Pillows

I saw these cute scrabble pillows online a while back and thought they would be perfect to make for my friend and her husband who love scrabble and just moved into a new house! The perfect house warming present!

I used my Silhouette Cameo and made letter stencils for a 12x12 pillow. Since I was making 4 pillows I didn't want them to be huge! I double checked the award amount on Google - for Scrabble fan's I didn't want to have the wrong point values! I used the first letter of their first and last names for the pillows.

Tulip fabric paint!

It was hard to get the vinyl to "stick" to the fabric so I was a bit nervous that it would bled, but it didn't! I did let it dry over night before I removed the vinyl.


Then I sewed a pillow and stuffed it!

I know they love Scrabble so I hope they like these pillows!

Sewed Ribbon Chevron Pillow

I added to my home decor my first chevron piece! I created a chevron pillow with fabric and white grosgrain ribbon and I love how it turned out!

I was not sure how long this would take to make and it was my second project with my new sewing machine that I am still trying to figure out. It took less than 2 hours and would have taken less had I not had issues with my sewing machine (still not sure if its the machine or user error :) )

My pillow ended up being a 16 x 16 inch square pillow.

I first started by measuring and marking my ribbon every 4 inches, to account for the seam allowance I did the first one in 4.25 inches - which I really would not have had to do, but I did. (Do you like my snowman PJs in the picture :) )



I decided to sew the ribbon every 2 inches for a total of 8 rows.

For my first row I used tape to mark the top and to mark the bottom (I added an extra .5 inches on the bottom again for seam allowance.) For the remaining rows I did not use the tape as it was not necessary and made the edges tear a bit.


Originally with adding the tape I thought I would not have to pin the ribbon, but after I started putting it together I found the tape was not needed, but the pins were a must! Much easier!




Time to sew! I sewed right down the middle of the ribbon (or as close to center as possible! - I'm a new sewer!!)




For the second plus rows, I used my acrylic ruler and placed it 2 inches above the starting point of the first line and sort of eyeballed where the ribbon should go, using the first row for the bottom points. I found it worked best to pin a row and sew it before pinning the next row.




More sewing! I found the easiest way to sew the angle change was to make sure the needle was down in the fabric, lift the foot up and turn the fabric with the needle down in the fabric. I am sure this is a basic sewing concept, but I am a new sewer!



8 rows later, the front of the pillow is complete!




I then sewed a basic envelope pillow.




Finished product! Love it in person!!


It looks great in my master bedroom. Here it's sitting on top of the first pillows I made with my new sewing machine. I might make too many pillows.... can you have too many pillows?

  

Tons of pillows

For Christmas it seemed like I made a ton of pillows. Not complaining, I actually had a lot of fun making them! For my second sister I made a set of pillows from these pretty Christmas pillows she gave me. I used extra fabric to sew new cases for them and stuffed them with the filling from these old pretty pillows.... The new cases are simple enough that if she wanted she could just use them as her pillows, without a case! I had to hand stitch these closed, not my favorite, but I got better as I went along. The white looks great! After a while my hand started to hurt and I was smart and left my whole in the middle so I still had nice corners and did not have to worry about that portion!!
I then made nice dark gray suede like pillows for the covers. I like to make envelope pillows since they are pretty simple for beginner sewers like myself! (I just started sewing in the past few months, and I love it!)
For my 3rd sister I also made her pillows. For her birthday which was in November I gave her the 2 Christmas pillows I made for myself using store bought inserts with the intention of making her some non-Christmas covers for Christmas. I also bought 2 larger inserts and made covers for those as well.

These are the 2 larger pillow covers I made. I thought I took pictures of the process along the way, but I can't find the pictures. I started with the pillow on the right and decided it was too plain with the fabric as is, so I decided to make pleats. Never having made pleats before made it a bit more challenging, but it was not so hard! I measured as I went and sort of eye-balled it. There has to be a good easy tutorial out there on how to do this, mine should be not how to do it!! I then made the pillow on the left. I love this green-blue silky fabric and to compliment the pillow on the right, I added 3 pleats.

Here are the 2 covers for the pillows I had already given her. I love the colors in this fabric!

Lastly, my 3rd sister went to France last summer so when I saw this fabric I thought it would be fun for her to put in her new first apartment! Since this was an odd shape I just stuffed this with extra batting.


So that was about 9 pillows I made! I am very excited because I got a sewing machine for Christmas, so now I can make lots of pillows for myself among other things!! I made all of these on my mom's old sewing machine that is a bit older than myself!

Christmas Pillows

I am so excited, I just finished two Christmas pillows!

The pillow on the right was inspired by the Crate and Barrel pillow.
I started by cutting 3 inch circles form about a 1/2 a yard of green felt fabric. I decided to only do one shade of green for my version.


I cut a tree shape out of felt, and used the fabulous tutorials all over the web folding the circle into forth and then put one stitch through it and then into the tree shaped background.

I then continued this about a hundred times!!


Until I had covered the entire tree.


I then used white fabric to sew a pillow. I like to make my pillows with the envelope closure so I can easily change my pillow cases out. I then hand sewed the tree to my pillow. This was a little harder than I thought because I had to be careful I did not sew through bother layers of the pillow. The inside of this pillow is very messy, but it's the inside, so it does not matter!

The back of the pillow.
I also made another pillow that I pined on Pinterest a while back. The original pin was Quiltish but I found it from the blog: inspired honey bee. I love how this pillow turned out. Even though I am not good at using Wonder Under, I used it and then used my sewing machine to outline the trees to the pillow.



Both of my pillows! Love them!