Embroidered Spring Pillows {Guest blogger} Dream Crafter!

Big Welcome to Ali from Dream Crafter! She is brilliant and here to share yet another brilliant idea for some super cute Spring Pillows!

Hi everyone! I’m Ali and I am from Dream Crafter. I can’t believe I get the honor of doing a guest post for Find It, Make It, Love It. Seriously, dream come true….and that’s coming from the Dream Crafter… so that is saying something. Ok…cheesy joke. I know. I’m sort of a cheese. Anyway…

There is something about Martha Stewart’s stuff that I just love. Maybe its the fact that almost everything she makes looks like it would fit into my dream country farm-house. Or maybe I just love it because its…purdy. 🙂

A while back I got this book from the library that was a Martha Stewart sewing and embroidery encyclopedia. I found these amazing bird and bug templates in the back and saw that she embroidered them on a pillow. I wanted to rip out the page and tape it to my existing pillows I loved them so much. But instead I just made me some.

Here is what you will need:

A pillow to cover (either an existing one or one from Goodwill or something), embroidery floss, pencil, enough fabric to cover your pillows, needle, printer.

INSTRUCTIONS:

First decide on what pillow you are going to cover. (I actually bought my pillows from the D.I.)

Next, cut your fabric so that you can sew an envelope with it….to make things easier, just watch this video. Its a really good tutorial on how to sew an envelope pillow if you don’t already know how.

If you don’t know what an envelope pillow is they look like this on the back:

So get your fabric cut as shown in the video. (I’m more a visual learner so I thought the video would be more helpful than a bunch of pictures.)

Wow…I can cut really straight…

Now you need to use your printer and decide what you want to sew on your pillows. There are 18 different birds to choose from that are all SO cute. Click here to scroll through the birdy options. I chose to use the scissor-tailed flycatcher, the Oklahoma state bird.

Now select “File,” “Print.” Select which page you want printed and just print that one page. It will print with all four birds on the one page. So cut out your desired bird and put it on your copy machine. Select “enlarge”. Now enlarge the photo on your copier until it is the desired size. I ended up enhancing mine by almost 400 percent and I needed to tape 4 pages together to get the right sized bird for my pillow.

As you can see, I chose to use white fabric. I did this so that I wouldn’t have to use transfer paper and I could just set my bird picture right under the fabric and trace it with a pencil. I used white muslin, but a white cotton would also work fine. If you want to use a dark fabric and stitch with a white embroidery floss you need to transfer your image using transfer paper. I don’t know how to do that so, don’t ask me. 🙂 But I do think that would make a gorgeous picture.

Now choose your embroidery floss color. I chose to use a dark navy blue since my living room colors are white, navy, grey and yellow. The color number I used was 930. Now thread up that needle and start stitching. *I found it much easier to use an embroidery hoop but do whatever floats your boat.

In the Martha Stewart tutorial, they say to use the chain stitch. I hate the chain stitch. I think it’s beautiful but it takes way too long for me. I have toddlers people. I wanted this project finished before next year. 🙂 I just used the good ole back stitch. You can get good accuracy with it and the lines look clean.