Pretty Pillows

A while back I found 4 couch pillows at a yard sale for 50 cents a piece. 50 cents?! Yes. If you've priced even a small miniature pillow form at any craft store, you know that 50 cents was just something I couldn't pass up. I really didn't know what I was going to do with them, but it didn't take long to figure it out. Getting the project done took a wee bit longer. In fact, I have only done 3 of them so far, but the last one will just be a quilt looking combination of the fabrics I bought (gulp!) for the backs of the 3 I now have propped on my couch.

Last week one evening, while I had a good long conversation with my sister Jen, I sat and did some seam and zipper ripping. Took out the zippers to reuse them and took apart the pillow coverings to use as patterns for the new pillows.

A quick trip to the local Goodwill on what happened to be 50% off day yielded me 2 white curtain panels perfect for the pillow tops.

Then on to the work part!
Clockwise starting upper left: I cut circles of two different sizes out of red felt for poppies. I used the door to my back yard as a copying tool. After printing words in fonts that were the size and look I wanted, I taped them to the window. Then I taped the fabric over the words, aligning them on the pillow as I wanted. Using a disappearing pen (although a pencil would work just as well) I traced the words on to the pillow squares. I sewed a dozen "poppies" onto one of the tops. A larger round topped with a smaller round and then atteched with a black button in the middle. I wanted just straight lines for stems so used the same pen to make lines which I then stitched with embroidery floss. Lastly, after the words were on the square I didn't like them. They weren't close enough together and sort of looked lost. I do have one more square of white fabric left, but wasn't the least bit interested in redoing it. So I drew more lines to make the words look as if they were in boxes. At this point, I'm getting a wee bit anxious to get these things done. Hand stitching all those lines was not an option. To the sewing machine it went.

The above photo of the fabric is really off in the color department. I'm really enjoying the Instagram application on my phone and wreak all kinds of havoc in the photo department with it!

The pillow below. Aaah. If you're hopping around on Pinterest, you may have seen this idea framed. The only thing I've left off is The dates our lives were forever changed part. For those of you who haven't seen this idea before, these dates reflect just that in our lives. Again, the dates went on using the same door window using disappearing pen. Then a black fabric marker for the writing. The red I winged. None of the other writing is my own on any of these, I figured I'd add a bit of mom's penning to this one. I have a thing about flowers so added a few of those as well.  

A few closer up shots of the pillows which I'm not sure we'll dare lay a head on!

After the fronts of the pillows were done (the fabric was glaring white) I tee stained them to give them a little elderly personality and non white color. I did have a problem. The tea water was warm and parts of the ink kind of smudged on one of the pillow. I don't know if the water was too hot for the type of fabric pen I used, but if you do this ... be careful. It didn't take away from the pillow, actually I sort of liked a smudge here and there once I got use to it.

I'm hoping to have the last of the pillows done this week and then I'll show you the backs of them and the front of the last one. The backs are all different, but have plenty of red in them.

Credit for the ideas for these pillows:
Poppies Pillow
Word Pillow
Dates Pillow