Embroidered Pillow

I meant to post this a while ago, but things just got away from me...big surprise. :) I did share this over at my YouTube channel, so feel free to check it out there also! Check out what I made!

I made this pillow as a little Mothers Day gift for myself - isn't it cute? If I would have had more time I would have made them for the kids grandmothers also, but as it is I only had time to make one. I love it!

I found the idea via Rubyellen over at Cakies - one of my favorite crafty blogs! I love her use of vintage materials and how she repurposes things for her home. I have found lots of great ideas there, which is good because my little house is sorely in need of revamping on a shoestring budget.

Anyway, I couldn't find the actual post when I saw the picture so I kept the overall idea in mind and went to the local St. Vincent de Paul on my home from work one day. It's a small shop but I find some really great things there. I'm still kicking myself for not grabbing the wicker chairs I saw there a few years ago...sigh. Anyway...I knew I wanted to make my pillow out of linen, so I dug through ladies jackets and came up with a solid lined and a patterned linen. Score! I think they cost me around $7 for both. I got home, measured a pillow form my mom had given me that had been sitting in the basement waiting for a purpose and went to work. I cut the pieces from the back of the jackets and sewed them together, leaving an opening at the bottom. The opening was actually too small and I really had to work to get the pillow in later (rookie mistake!).

I inked up the kids handprints onto copy paper and cut them out. I pinned them to the pillow (something that was actually more hassle than it needed to be) and used black embroidery floss to outline the prints. This went very fast actually...I only used a simple running stitch and didn't get too worked up if the stitches weren't perfectly spaced (though I was careful...I admit I couldn't abandon my perfectionist tendencies completely). I then added the heart in red, and the year at the bottom, stuffed the pillow case and sewed up the bottom. And done!

The pillow pops up in various rooms courtesy of my children, who love to move pillows all over the house depending on where the latest fort or cuddle party is. :)

I wish I had done this years ago, when they were smaller...even at 4 and 6 yrs old their hands were big enough to fill the square. I wonder if I could find various handprints of theirs from over the years and create a collage of these on linen in simple black frames...like a growth chart of handprints. Hmmm...