Crafty Crafter

I've pinned any number of cute throw pillows because pillows are easy and cheap to make at home, or crazy expensive to buy while I'm hating myself for going shopping with my kids. Unfortunately to make pillows you have to buy fabric, so there is SOME shopping involved, but I was lucky enough to be kid-free one morning and hit up Hobby Lobby. Found some super-cute polka-dot fabric on clearance for $4 a yard, so I bought 1 yard to make 2 pillows, plus 2 colors of felt (4 sheets of felt for $1, I bought 4 sheets of each color, so $2) to make the flower petals. Total for each pillow, then was $3! Hooray! The instructions for this particular pillow come from http://www.cluckclucksew.com/2008/09/petal-pillow-tutorial.html

 

Here is how mine turned out:

 Notice the lovely purple knit blanket behind the pillow, it's the one I lovingly spend 800 hours on for my baby girl, which turned out to be baby boy Ethan. Anyway, the pillow was indeed very simple, but mine took lots longer than 30 minutes to make since I was whipping it up in the middle of the day with kids running all around. I had to forcibly remove Ethan from sitting on top of my sewing machine pedal more than once.

The next pillow was an idea from dollarstorecrafts.com, which (you guessed it) is dedicated to ideas for crafts you can make solely from items you find at the dollar store! Love it because it means I can go to the Dollar Tree (just down the road) and bring my kids because they can all pick 1 item and then they're quiet, good shoppers so I'll actually BUY their items. Hobby Lobby, much as I adore it, is clear across town and I can't get out of there for less than $50, EVER.  So I've seen and I loved these felt leaf placemats, but I never use placemats, so I was so excited to see them used as a PILLOW! Pillows, I use.

You know any girls who loves naps loves pillows. I worked on this very late into the evening as Joe and I caught a few episodes of Scandel (he's hooked, thank goodness) and nobody claimed it was a 30-minute pillow in the first place, but GUYS... this is NOT a 30-minute pillow. It SHOULD be, it's so simple! Stitch an existing felt leaf placemat onto white fabric, fold it inside-out and whip the sides together, and BOOM. But I was very particular about my pinning, I wanted the fabric to align perfectly with no shifting (which I did, so that's good), so I pinned the heck out of that leaf. Then I wanted to make sure all the edges were securely sewn down, so there was a LOT of angles and turns and sewing veeeery sloooowly. It took about 90 minutes, start to finish.

Still! The fabric was $8 a yard (I bought nice thick fabric since it's white and it's just a slipcover, it needed to cover my dark brown couch pillows!) and each pillow took 1/2 a yard, plus a $1 placemat. $5 a pillow? Yes, please! The two episodes of Scandel it took to make it were practically a bonus, I love that show.

 

The bad part about the whole 2-tv-show-episodes, 90-minute pillow craft-a-palooza was that the next morning I was exhausted! It went down after Joe finished tiling, so I was making this at indecent hours. The next morning I catnapped on the couch while my kids ate Halloween candy and cheese puffs for breakfast while watching cartoons. But hey! I had this super-cute pillow to nap on, candy for breakfast is a dream come true and happens roughly never at our house, so it's all good.