Paint your pillows? Sure!

This is one of my early posts when I started blogging in April. It's not an oldie, but it's a goodie! Family duties have sabotaged the blog post I'd planned for this week, so I'm sharing this post again. Thanks for visiting!

Look, new pillows for my bedroom! And they only took a bit of thinking and best of all they were almost (less than $1 each ) free! (I'm still pretty new to the whole blogging thing so I'm working on it with these pillow posts. Bear with me, I plan to make things better but as they say, practice practice practice. And maybe you'll get an idea for your own projects.)


Okay, I switched to a teal comforter on our master bed and wanted/needed pillows to give it some ooomph but as usual, I had no pillow budget. The REAL budget laughs at the concept of a pillow budget and would give it a wedgie if it came close. But I DID have this fabric in my craft room stash......


I love the brown and white print and bought all they had when I found a sale for $1 a yard. I am an absolutely sucker for a fabric bargain! The teal fabric is a standard Walmart flat sheet, and I bought it because for $4 you get several yards of usable fabric. (Here's a hint-at Halloween WM has single flat sheets in BLACK for $4. That's enough for lots of Halloween projects right there!) And the embroidered white on black fabric was a remnant, but a big one, almost a full yard. So here are two of the pillows.....



.....and yes, I dinked around with the fabric to make it match my bedroom. Yup, I painted them. I experimented a bit with remnants and found a look that I liked and so I went to town. First I chose a craft acrylic in teal and watered it down alot. Then I sprayed each fabric piece with water to dampen it and with a paintbrush just touched into the paint I then touched the brush to the fabric. The cohesion of the water in the brush to the damp fabric just drew the color into the threads and it was easy and fun to do. I actually laughed out loud as I was doing it cus it was coming out so cool! Since the paint is so thin, the fabric takes the color without getting stiff. I LOVE the watercolor look on the white pillow, much better than a solid teal dyed background. I sprayed it with water before it was dry to increase the splotchy quotient. On the embroidered pillow I only colored half the embroidery so the pillow is half teal and half white stitching. It looks very much like a custom job. Oh wait, it is a custom job.




And the pin tuck pillow? Talk about a big bang for notalotta effort and cheap. I like cheap. I found a tutorial online for making pin tucks and if I had been thinking then I'd have a link now. But it's very easy, and I will be posting a tutorial on that one one day. However, just for this post, I'll tell you that marking a grid on the pillow fabric then pinching it up and sewing around that pinched up fabric gives you an awesome effect on the other side. The more you pinch, the deeper the pleats and the more plush the effect. I will be making more pin tuck projects in the future you can bet!


So my total cost on this project was minimal but let's break it down...

brown and white fabric @ $1 a yard less than $1

white embroidered black remnant $1 less than $1
(I still have enough of each fabric to make a smaller pillow)

Craft paint on hand zero extra cost
old bed pillows stuffed into new bed pillows zero
WalMart flat single sheet for $4 less than $1.00
(I made 6 full size pillow cases with the rest of the sheet)

So total cost was less than $4 which brings each pillow to less than $1 each. Even the REAL budget condescended enough to give the pillow budget a nod of approval. And now since I have the bed pillows I wanted, I can get on with the fun part of redecorating our master bedroom with a new color scheme....shopping for accessories at thrift stores and yard sales!!