Happy Valentine's Day

I made these for Abe today, for Valentine's Day. We're enjoying them a little bit early, because really, who can let chocolate covered strawberries sit around?

DIY Pillows

Browsing through the Pottery Barn catalog the other day I came across some new pillows they have that caught my attention.

These two are made of linen and hemp, and I just really like the rough and casual look of them. I also like the print on the pillows below (they have a few more on their site with numbers on them that are really cute too).

I've been reading a lot of design blogs lately and came across this video from Young House Love. With all these images in my head, I felt inspired this morning while at the fabric store (for a completely unrelated project), and bought a yard of burlap (which is really cheap by the way) and a pillow form. Then I went home and started on my project.

What I decided to do was to make a burlap pillow with the letter D (for our last name) stenciled on the front. I made my stencil with my Cricut (the Plantin Schoolbook cartridge, set to 6"). I put some temporary adhesive on the back of the cardstock, close to the edges of the letter, and adhered it to the center of the burlap. Then I started adding some ink (just the same ink I use on my scrapbooking pages, since I didn't want to buy a whole lot of different materials to do this and wanted the cost to remain low).

Here's what it looked like after I took off the cardstock stencil:

Then started sewing (my sewing skills are reeeeaaaalllly bad...I wouldn't even call them skills. I just barely get by on the sewing machine).

And here's the finished product! Simple, but kind of cute, and it cost me all of $10 :) I was pretty proud of myself when I was finished. Mostly because I actually followed through with a DIY home project that I had in my head, instead of just thinking about doing it. I have so many things I want to do to decorate my house, but I rarely follow through. I hope to change that this year.