DIY Christmas pillows

Hello all,
  Welcome back.. and so soon!? =) I've got another simple project for you today to cozy up your house for the holidays.
  I'm not sure why, but I've been in love with deer head silhouettes lately and had this and many other ideas in mind for Christmas..so you may see more of this guy later on.
 First, you'll need to find a silhouette shape that you like. there are tons to choose from online and you can freehand some of them pretty easily or if you have a die cutting machine like I do that's even easier. For my design I chose the Glitz Design deer from their finnely line in the Silhouette store.. there are several other layers to him but I only used the base. I have the Silhouette SD machine so my max is 8.5x11" I stretched this guy as much as possible to fit my page and cut away on some regular old cardstock. Here is my template =)

Now, you'll measure out how big you want your pillow to be. I was using up scraps of material so it ended up being a rectangle instead of the usual square but, I really love that about it. Place your stencil on the fabric and be sure to put some cardboard or scrap papers behind the front panel so your paint doesn't bleed through to the back of the pillow. I used some removable adhesive to keep it in place and just used some regular acrylic paint I had. I'm not exactly sure if acrylic paint is the best for fabric or if it would hold up to a washing machine but the bottle says it's permanent on any porous surface.. works for me. I put on two coats, one in Apple Barrel-Barn Red and one in regular Red to get the color I wanted. You may have noticed I made a little boo boo so I decided to outline him in some glitter glue (stickles in platinum) to hide it a bit..it didn't totally cover it up but I'm ok with it.
Let that dry completely.

Now all we have to do it sew it up.. so for those of you who don't sew I'll give you a quick rundown of what I did. Flip your panels so the fronts are facing each other and line them up along the edge. Sew around the edges and leave a little room for yourself to get the stuffing inside. Before you flip it right side out cut a slit on the corners from the corner edge to the stitch (this will help make your corners pointy) then flip it, stuff and close up the pillow by hand stitching. (I really stink at hand stitching things and making it look nice so I usually make sure to leave this area at the bottom of the pillow so nobody knows ;))
 And there ya have it. I made the green chevron one to add a little more color.

See you again soon! =)