I’m finally back to crafting for our house!  We have been doing minor updating to our master bath recently, so that inspired me to spruce up the master bedroom some too.  Hunter’s dad is going to build us a new wooden bed with a great headboard at some point (which I’m super excited for), so in the meantime I decided to improve our pillow game.

Hand Painted ‘Home’ Pillows

What you’ll need:

• 2 18″x18″ pillow cases
• Fabric paint
• Paint brush
• Pencil
• 2 18″x18″ pillow inserts

Our bed has some euro shams, and king size pillows, and I thought it needed some smaller decorative pillows in front. Of course I haven’t seen anything I liked when I’ve been out, so like most other things, I decided to make my own.

Hobby Lobby has great pillow cases you can use as a foundation (as done before here), so I bought 2 canvas covers and started figuring out what I wanted to put on them.  Originally I wanted to do a quote across the 2 pillows, but Hunter thought it was too cheesy.  However, he really liked the college idea I showed him, but I wasn’t crazy about GT and Clemson on our bed.  Ultimately I decided to go with outlines of the states we’re from, with hearts over the cities we grew up in (sound familiar, Lauren?).

Okay, first use a pencil and draw the outline of the state on the pillow case.  Pencil is harder to see, but you can erase it when you mess up.  I just googled ‘outline of Georgia’ to get an image I could use as a reference.

Next, paint the outline of the states you just sketched out.  My outlines were about 1/2″ thick, and I used 2 coats so you couldn’t see the pencil through the paint.

Note: If you know you’ll need to wash the pillow cases, make sure you use fabric paint, otherwise any paint will work.

Finally, put a heart over the cities — good ole Peachtree City, GA and Spartanburg, SC.

When the paint is dry, put the inserts in the covers, and your pillows are done!

I think I’ll still make the college ones to put on our couch for the upcoming football season — this means a Clemson one is coming your way, Panda!  And I’m sure you’ll see the cheesy quote in something else I make later..

Want a custom one for yourself? Contact me on Etsy!