Valentine Pillows

I love decorating my house for the holidays, and I know it's not quite time for Valentine's Day, but I saw some painted pillows the other day, and I reaaalllly wanted to try making one. (I LOVE that I have a 'blog excuse' now to make crafts. :D haha)

Anyway, here is how they turned out:

Heart-Shaped Pillow
The first one was really simple - well except for the fact that I am horrible at sewing! (Don't look too close).
I got some beautiful red chenille on sale, and it was still $10 a yard, so I got 1/2 yard and was able to make 2 heart-shaped pillows.  Not bad I think. :)

 So, you turn your fabric right side in, and I needed a heart to trace, so I used this heart plate from the Target $1 bin.

I just traced around my heart shape, pinned it and sewed it up. And in my excitement - I forgot to leave a spot open to fill with stuffing, and had to unpick some stitches! hahaha (Don't be jealous of my amazing sewing skills).

Anyway, just trim the edges, turn right side out, stuff with batting and stitch up the opening!  Super easy!

Painted Pillow
This next one is my favorite - I think it turned out so pretty.  Everyone that sees it wonders if it's got vinyl on it, but it's paint.

Materials:
Pillow case or white fabric
stencil
Americana Fabric Painting Medium
Americana Paint (I used Poodleskirt Pink and Napa Red)
paintbrush
wax paper (to protect back of fabric from paint)

I bought some white muslin that was really cheap, but I'm sure you could use a pillow cover from the dollar store or even just a plain pillowcase.

My pillow measures 18"x12", that's just the size I decided to make. 

I used my Silhouette to cut out some contact paper that I used as a stencil.  If you don't have a Silhouette, you could print your lettering onto freezer paper and use that instead. (Basically, you just cut out your lettering with an X-ACTO knife, and iron it to your material shiny side down.)

The font I used is SNF Infinity Bold, and I just enlarged it so that all the words wouldn't fit on my pillow at once.  Does that make sense?  I wanted it to look like they were running off  the fabric.

 This stencil looks crooked, because I cut the words separately, but I used a yardstick to make sure they were all even. (pretty much). :D

NOTE: Make sure you put some wax paper or something in between your layers, because it will totally bleed through!

Follow the directions on your fabric paint.  I used Americana Fabric Painting Medium, and I love it because I can mix it with any of my other paint colors. Which is nice, because I have a bazillion of those little paint bottles.  I think you mix 2 parts paint to 1 part medium, and you only need a tiny bit.  (I think I used a 1/4 tsp to measure it out).

Make sure your edges are sealed down really well, so you don't bleed out of the lines.

Let it dry.  I'm impatient with drying time, but luckily it dried really fast! :)

I did one row at a time, so I could see where I wanted my words, and some might overlap.  I didn't really even measure the rows, I'm sure they're horribly spaced, but I wanted it to look kind of random and hand-drawn.  Uh-huh. yep. I wanted it that way! ;P

Well, there you go - hope you like them!  I have another pillow I'm working on that I will show you soon. :D

Thanks for stopping by!