LoveOlympiaJune: DIY Canvas Floral Pillow

Sunday, June 17, 2012

DIY Canvas Floral Pillow

Hello, hello everyone!! Happy day to you. :)

I hope you all enjoyed your Father's Day and got to spend it with family and friends.

We had a nice relaxing weekend with friends, followed by dinner at our home. I am kicking myself for not taking pictures of dinner (sounds kinda weird, I know) but it would've made for a good post. For dinner I made a delicious cheesy chicken lasagna with white sauce and it was sooooo good! Ahhh...next time I will try and remember to take pics of things like that for future posts.

Moving on to today's DIY project.

Last week, I completed a simple project that was fun. :)

I decided that for our breakfast nook I would fill our seating area with comfortable pillows instead of making slipcovered bench seats. Maybe sometime in the future (like in a few years or something) I will make cushions for the bench seats, but because of how much that would've cost over using pillows, I decided not to do it.

So where did I get pillows on the cheap?

Every now and then my daughter and I love to shop around Target to check out their clearance section because they sometimes have amazing deals on things that were a little overpriced for our taste to begin with. For example, when I decided to use pillows to decorate our breakfast nook, I went to Target and browsed their clearance section to see if any pillows were on sale. After a week or so, they had a few on sale for an amazing price and I was ecstatic!! For under $10.00, I bought a few pillows and decided to use them to decorate our hand-made slipcovered armchairs and our nook.

Want to see them?

Okay...here are some pictures of the ones I purchased and the pillow I ended up covering as a DIY project (which is pictured on the right).

The pillow to the left is one of the ones I purchased at Target and decided that because I loved the amperstand so much and the subtle neutral colors, I wasn't going to cover it with new fabric.
But since I bought 2 of them, I kept one the way it was originally and decided to cover the other with something different.

To start, I made these flowerets from left-over canvas dropcloth (which was left-over from the slipcovers I made) using a tutorial which can be found here. It was super easy to follow and took me a couple tries to get the flowers to look the way I wanted them to.

All in all, they turned out pretty neat so then I laid them out on my gray fabric (purchased at JoAnn's a while back on sale).

I was originally planning on making 5 or 6 flowers and did just that, but decided that 3 laid out diagonally looked the best so I stuck with it and threw out the others.

After measuring out how much fabric I needed, I cut and pinned everything in place.

I wanted the pillow cover to be a little tight (and I probably should have pulled it tighter...oh well!) and used pins to keep it all in place.

I also folded over the edges of the fabric so you wouldn't see the uneven scissor marks (thankfully!!!)

This was the side I was the least happy with when I started because you can see where I folded the edges of the fabric together instead of making it to look like it was professionally sewn, but whatevs. It ended up not being a big deal once the pillow was done. :)

Here is a close-up of one of the flowers I made from the dropcloth. I pinned the backs of them together before gluing it in place.

I played around with the spacing between the each flower and then once I was satisfied with the placement, it was time to glue.

Yes, you read that right! I glued not only the flowers onto the pillow but also the pillow edges. :)

Sounds kind of crazy because I didn't sew anything, but I figured gluing was a quicker way to get this done and since I wanted to complete this during one of my daughter's naps, gluing won over sewing.

So I heated up my glue gun and got ready to complete this project!

Sorry I didn't take pictures of every single step, but there was no need. I just glued the edges and the flowers on in a few minutes and picked off any dried glue I found along the way. :)

If I had to redo this all over again (which will sort of happen because I will be making a few more of these for our nook), I would pull the fabric just a tad tighter so you wouldn't have any bagginess in the pillow like you see below.

And here it sits in our kitchen nook!!!