My whole goal with the bedding in our master bedroom is to stick with blues, whites, and creams, but really amp up the interest with texture. So when I saw this picture in the May issue of Better Homes and Gardens, I was all like, “OMG, love.”

Better Homes and Gardens, May 2011 | Photographed by Marshall Johnson

I love it all, but that blue tufted pillow especially because it reminds me of something my dad’s mother would have had. And it fits into my color + texture parameters. I checked the resources section and googled around, but I couldn’t find anything similar within my price range. I lamented.

Then, when Amanda at Our Humble A{Bowe}d said she got two velvet throw pillows at World Market for only $10 each, I got excited. I hadn’t been to World Market in years, but I stopped by after work one day and was glad that I did. That place has some cool stuff at ah-mazing prices. I’ll definitely be back. I picked up a velvet pillow in a rich teal hue with plans to tuft it myself. Here’s how I did it:

Step 1: Borrow my friend Cassie’s wonderful button collection to shop from

Step 2: Choose two tiny but adorable coral-colored glass buttons

Step 3: Fail at various tufting strategies. Decide not to share the gory details publicly.

Step 4: Use a small crochet hook to pull thin yarn through the various holes I made in failed attempts

Step 5: Continue using the crochet hook to thread the yarn back and forth through the center of the pillow a few times

Step 6: Pull yarn taut and fashion into a knot, creating a tuft

Step 6: Thread a regular ol’ needle and tie one of the glass buttons onto the end.

Step 7: Push the needle through the center-ish of the tuft and thread it through the other button on the backside.

Step 8: Thread back and forth a few times, looping through the back of the button each time and trying to get them pretty snug up into the tuft

Step 9: Do the best job you can of tying off the thread without letting the buttons get all loose-like. Trim the extra thread

Step 10: Admire your handiwork. Wish you had a fancier camera. Or actual photography skills.

I’ll be the first to admit that it doesn’t really look anything like the inspiration pillow, but I like it nonetheless. After looking at these pictures, though, I am thinking that the tiny little coral buttons are perhaps a bit too small. Maybe they’d have a little more oomph if they were backed with larger mother-of-pearl buttons? I kind of love the pop of coral against the rich blue, especially since it ties into the floral linen on the hope chest. I am so not a million-throw-pillows-on-the-bed kinda gal, but I think that I am going to whip up one more teeny tiny pillow to make this pair a trio. All good things come in threes.

 I mentioned in my list of things I want to make and do that I wanted to paint a bunny silhouette to remember Harold by, and this weekend I decided to make it happen. I recently ordered the Mr. Pavo Real print I’ve been coveting. I picked up an 11×14 matted frame for it at Family Dollar for $6. Since my frame and the canvas I want to hang next to it are both 11×14, I thought an arrangement of three similarly-sized items would be perfect above the armoire.

So, I cut a piece of my estate sale fabric to 11×14 using my handy dandy cardboard grid, then printed out a silhouette of a bunny from google and slid it under my fabric.

 

Next, I used a fabric marking pencil to trace the outline.

I gathered black, gray, and white acrylic paints I had on hand and mixed them  together for the perfect shade of gray, then added a healthy dose of textile medium.

I used a small foam brush to fill in the silhouette and allowed it to dry, and was left with this (I forgot to take a picture of the front until it was already up on the wall with silver thumbtacks).

Love it. I laid my fabric, frame, and canvas face down on the ground to figure out the spacing. Pistachio did her best to sabotage me at every step.

Then I wrote myself a little roadmap on the back of my printed silhouette to tell me where to put nails into the wall. 

I used a pencil and a level with a ruler to mark where to hammer.

Except it was way too high, in my opinion. I had arbitrarily decided that the bottom of the center frame should be 10″ above the dresser and I was tragically wrong. (Excuse the messy room, please. It was the weekend and the livin’ was easy.)

I got Nick to hoist me atop the armoire once again and used the level/ruler to mark new holes exactly 5″ below their predecessors and liked the look much better. I erased my pencil lines and used wood filler and leftover paint to disguise the old holes.

The very next day my Mr. Pavo Real print came in the mail and got to join Mr. Bunny.

I love it. Now I just need to figure out what to do with that canvas. I’m still thinking some sort of word or phrase, but inspiration hasn’t yet struck as to the specifics or how it should look.

I love the casual look of the bunny silhouette just pinned up there, and it’s definitely nice to have a little reminder of the sweet bunny I had for six years. I wonder if I washed it a few times if it would take on a cool aged and distressed look. I worry since the edges aren’t hemmed that a trip through the washing machine would result in a frayed and tangled mess, and hand washing might not be enough to do the job of wearing down the paint. If I did something like this again it might be cool to experiment with blotting the paint off while it’s still wet, but that still probably wouldn’t give it the softness of repeated washings. If you’re less lazy than me and try something like this, hem the edges and run it through the wash a bunch of times and let me know how it turns out!

First off, a big thank you goes out to all of you who have entered the first ever giveaway so far! It is so nice to hear from some of you who have never commented before, and I am so touched by all of the positive feedback. Thank you so much! If you haven’t entered yet, be sure to do so by tomorrow night!

UpcycledHome | Etsy.com

I’ve been really digging the look of chunky chevron lately, and ever since Sherry Petersik introduced me to the concept of painting fabric I’ve been totally obsessed with the idea of painting blue chevron stripes onto a throw pillow.

I dug through the big pile of off-white fabric I got at an estate sale a while back and pulled out two different colored pieces to compare in their soon-to-be natural habitat.

I like the lighter colored one better, so I cut two 18″ by 18″ squares from it. This fabric is really old and far from pristine, so I just aimed for the least-stained areas and chalked the rest up to character.

Then I used a fabric marking pencil I got at Hancock Fabrics to make a grid of dots 3″ apart from one another. You can see them if you really squint in the photo below. I used my handy cardboard mat thingy to help me cut straight lines and mark my grid. Apparently it’s supposed to be used for drafting patterns, but as my fabric was thin enough to see the lines through I found it really helpful for this purpose.

I used the lines on my cardboard mat once again as a guide to connect my dots in a chevron pattern. Resume squinting.

Next, I mixed various paint colors together in a plastic cup until I had what I thought was the perfect hue, being sure to mix up plenty so I wouldn’t run out and have to recreate my genius. Then I dumped about half of the textile medium ($1.50 at Hobby Lobby and found near the craft paints) into the cup (side note: this is where I wish I’d done things differently. See end of post for regrets).

I used a small sponge brush to start filling in my lines. I just flipped my cardboard mat over to paint on.

I didn’t take a picture after the first coat had dried and I wish that I had. The first coat left some thin spots. I thought I could get away with just filling in the light areas since I was using flat paint, but it ended up looking really uneven. So I hand washed the piece (to avoid crazy edge-fraying) and hung it to dry, hoping the discrepancies would fade, but no luck. I decided then to paint over all of the stripes again, and it looked a little better, but still kinda funky. I washed and dried again and I’m convinced that this is as good as it gets, but I wish I’d just left it with some light spots after the first coat. It looked kind of vintage and weathered anyway.

Despite the kind-of-obvious painted effect, I’m digging the color and pattern big time.

In the past, I’ve always made pillows with an envelope closure on the back, but it never works out quite right for me, and I don’t find myself taking the pillow covers off to wash often anyway, so I decided to throw cleanliness to the wind and just sew this baby up on all four sides. It was sew so so so much easier and less stressful. I just placed the two pieces right sides together and sewed up three sides on my machine, then left a gap in the middle of the fourth side. I ran my machine back and forth a few times over the edges of the gap to reinforce it.

I laid it out flat and trimmed the excess fabric from the corners, then turned the whole thing inside out and used the tip of a pencil to point the corners out so they were nice and crisp.

Next up was stuffing my insert inside, which I poached from another pillow I had fallen out of love with. At this point I regretted making my opening so small, but with some persistence and elbow grease it all worked out.

And finally, I used some white thread to sew up the opening by hand.

And here it is in our bedroom! I really love the graphic contrast it provides to some of the more frilly elements, such as the ruffled shams and floral hope chest.

Here’s my list of regrets:

• I should have followed the actual instructions on the bottle of textile medium and mixed it in a 1:1 ratio to the paint. I didn’t want to use up the whole bottle, but I could have just used a little paint at a time to mix up what I needed. I ended up with paint that wasn’t quite as fabric-friendly as it could have been and plenty left over.
• I should have just left it at one coat. It got stupid looking after that. Maybe that wouldn’t have happened if I’d used the proper amount of textile medium.
• I should have made the opening to stuff my insert in a little bigger. It was like reverse childbirth trying to get that thing in there, and I ripped the fabric a little. Fortunately, I was able to mend it when I sewed up the opening by hand.

So there’s my first fabric-painting adventure! Despite my missteps, I feel like there’s real potential for this technique. The chance to adorn plain ol’ fabric with whatever patterns or images I can create by hand opens up a brave new world of handicrafts!