Last year I had a few coastal Christmas projects, so this year I wanted to fill in the gaps where I knew I was missing things before totally unpacking everything (Read: I wasn’t allowed to pull out Christmas decorations until after Thanksgiving, so I came up with projects for me to work on in the mean time).

I thought some throw pillows would be a great way to easily (and cheaply) spice up your seating without buying something big.  I saw these great ‘no sew pillows’ on Pinterest, and decided to give the project a shot.

DIY Holiday Throw Pillows

What you’ll need:

• Template
• Iron on glitter sheet
• Pillow cover
• Pillow insert
• Exacto knife or scissors
• Tape
• Iron
• Dish towel

First of all I had to figure out what I wanted my pillows to say and come up with a design.  I decided on a lyric from one of my favorite Christmas hymns, “All is calm” for one pillow, and the outline of the Grinch’s face (because he’s just awesome) for the other.  Then I got to work on a design, keeping in mind that I would be cutting out the letters / outline, so nothing too crazy.

Once I had my templates ready, I printed them out, and picked out some pillow covers, pillow inserts, and glitter sheets at Hobby Lobby.  I ironed my pillow covers since they were a little wrinkly, laid out the template on the glitter paper, and taped them together so it wouldn’t move when tracing.

Then I used a marker similar to the color of the paper to trace the design onto the glitter paper.  I learned that holding it up to a window or having some sort of light come through makes it easier to see the design and trace.

I used Tulip’s glitter transfer sheets which were a little easier to work with than what the other post mentioned — instead of peeling things and not cutting through all the layers, I just had to cut out the design.

Once it was cut out I ironed it onto the pillow cover, with a thin dishtowel between the iron and transfer.  After checking that the transfer was on the pillow securely, it was on to the next pillow!

Is this not the classiest Grinch pillow you ever did see?  Proof that your inner child can come out without being cheesy or cartoony.

After I showed Hunter the Grinch pillow, he said he needed eyes and the smirky smile, so I added them in with black puffy paint, and toned it down with some silver glitter on top.

I learned that the bigger, Grinch template was easier to work with, and turned out a little better — the small letters were hard to cut out and iron.  Next time I’ll stick to bigger text or more shapes 🙂

Update: Once I had a Cricut, making iron on pillows was 100x easier.  This way works if you don’t have a Cricut, but if you want to make a lot of pillows a Cricut will make the cutting of heat transfer vinyl a breeze 🙂  Check out all my pillows here!