Slipcovered Bench

I'm here with another quick DIY project that was completed last week but I am just not getting around to posting about it.  :)

If you remember from before, in our dining room we have a bench on one side of our dining room table that I recovered a while back. After living with it for a while, it just wasn't working with how I wanted our dining room to turn out. So I needed a new plan!

I took some extra fabric, the same fabric I used to make this pillow, and cut out the amount that I needed to recover the bench.

Then I measured how far up I wanted the fabric to hang from the top of the bench and made sure that all of the sides were equal in distance.

I pinned all of the edges and hot glued them together so they were all even and clean.

Then I pinned the corners and sides because that was where I needed to sew in order to keep the cover nice and tight.

I hand-sewed the corner pieces and tied a knot at the end to keep everything nice and tight and in place.

Then I cut the extra fabric off the sides and flipped over the fabric (inside out) to fit it back onto our bench.

Excuse the creases in the fabric! Hehe...I still need to iron the fabric but just haven't gotten around to doing that yet. :)

I know the fabric is neutral and plain, but that is what I have been trying to go for in this part of our home. I figure that by making bigger pieces like these neutral, that leaves room for colorful accessories that can easily be changed out if needed. :)

That's all for now, folks!

Have a wonderful Tuesday and thanks for stopping by!

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!!!

Even though it looks like a hand-made project, I kind of really love it!

Wait...not kind of, but I really do love it!!

Please tell me what you think!

Have you made any pillows lately?

Thanks for stopping by!

http://www.creatingreallyawesomefreethings.com/

www.somewhatsimple.com

Father's Day and Total Church

Well, it is Friday and the weekend is almost here! Which means that Father's Day is coming up and we can't wait to celebrate at our house. :)

image

Recently, my hubby and I have been reading a book together called Total Church, and we have really been enjoying it. We read this book together almost every night (as we do with other books, too) and it has been something that we look forward to doing because not only do we learn from each other about various things, but we also have time to talk and apply what we read to our lives.
I do hope to share more about this book later with you all, but for now we will keep things short. :)

I also wanted to share this post with you today to say that I feel truly blessed to have a husband who is not only my best friend, but is also the greatest father to our little girl! We love spending time together and feel so blessed that the Lord has given us our commitment to Him and to each other.  :) Happy Father's Day babe!

And Happy Father's Day to all of the dad's out there! Being a father is such an important role in a child's life and being a loving father modeled after Christ can make a huge difference.

Happy Friday and thanks for stopping by!