I’ve been excited for weeks about this post. It’s been a torture having to wait until today but here we are Yayyyy. I’m being silly, I know. But the thing is I loved so much how these red and white Christmas pillows turned out that I was dying to share it. Why didn’t I share this before, you may ask? Well, I’m a part of an awesome group Called Silhouette Challenge and we have a monthly challenge that goes live on the second Monday of each month. This was my project for it so now you see why I had to wait.
DIY Easy Red and White Christmas Pillows
The problem was not the waiting itself, the problem is that I was so excited about this month’s Challenge that I was ready like over two weeks ago LOL.
Yes I now I got a little carried away…
But hey! It’s Christmas and Christmas makes me too happy and inspired!
For this project I used two techniques. On some I used Heat transfer vinyl and on the other I used stencil, paint and glitter. I used basically for our home decoration 3 colors: red, white and gold.
I recently share our Christmas Decoration Home Tour 2015 where you can see all the decoration we made. These pillows turned out to be the perfect addition and I can’t be happier. Hope you like these too!
Supplies:
- 1 yard of your favorite fabrics or more depending on the size of your pillows {I used red with stars and a plaid white and red}
- Stencil material {I confess I used contact paper}
- White heat transfer vinyl
- Gold fabric paint
- Gold glitter
- Fabric Glitter glue
First cut the pieces of your fabric. In my case my pillows are squared. And I didn’t want to use buttons or zippers so the opening is in the back of the pillows.
If the pillows are 46X46 cm, cut:
- Front 1 piece 50×50 cm.
- Back 2 pieces 50x 35 cm.
Lets Work on the design.
I made a design for heat transfer using the words Joy and Noel. I used my own fonts for this and a cute design from Silhouette store. I weld them together.
For cutting I mirrored the image and set knife according to Silhouette settings.
Send to cut.
Once cut, use the hook tool to remove all the unwanted pieces. Including all the surrounding HTV.
Place the Image centered on your fabric front piece, right side and laid a t-shirt piece of fabric on top the design, iron in cotton settings pressing down firmly for about 40-60 seconds {it might vary between irons} until you make sure the image is really stuck to the fabric. If you peel away the plastic and the vinyl is not set, continue ironing for a few more seconds.
I let it cool for a few seconds and started peeling away the plastic very carefully.
To wash it you can just machine wash and dry inside out {the lower the heat the better}.
There you go, your pillow design is ready! I did this with the other pillow.
I used a reindeer design from silhouette store for the painted pillow. In this case there is no need to mirror it. Just send to cut and set knife to the suggested settings.
Protect with plastic the surface where you are going to work.
Place your fabric over the plastic, right side up.
Place your design centered in the fabric.
Start painting. In my case seems like the type of fabric rejected the contact paper. So I had to be extra careful to paint it. I used a sponge and painted only tapping over the design. I applied 2 layers of paint. Let it dry a bit. I waited about 20 minutes.
Protect the surroundings of your design and spread carefully the glitter glue for fabric and apply the glitter. Wait at least 5 minutes before removing the excess of glitter.
After removing the glitter you will still have some glitter around, leave it and take it outside {if your weather allows} or close to a window to let it completely dry. It would take a couple hours.
Let’s sew the pillows.
Double fold over the long edge of your back pieces about 1 inch and sew. Do this for both pieces.
With your front piece facing up, place both back piece facing down on top of it as shown and overlapping each other.
Pin all the way around and sew all the way around the edges.
Flip your pillow cover inside out and sew all the way around the edges again to create a fun border.
That’s it! How easy right?
Making these pillow covers without any design should take you no more than 20 minutes each. I made all 4 pillow covers in about 2 hours including designs and photos LOL.
Insert your pillows inside your covers and voila!
The last one I made was my reindeer pillow. After a couple hours it was completely dry and with a brush I remove any remaining of glitter from the design leaving only the stuck glitter.
Do the same with the rest of the covers you might want to make.
I SO crazily love how these red and white christmas pillows turned out! The living room looks so festive and bright! I’m really happy with the results. We already had these yellow pillows that went perfect with the color combo!
