I don’t usually do a lot of Valentine’s Day decorating, but this year I wanted to do a simple mantel and a Valentine’s Day pillow.  I’ve been seeing a lot of textured pillows around lately and I love the look of them. It has inspired me to try to make my own.  I have been playing around with some ideas and will be sharing a couple more pillows with you soon. However, for Valentine’s Day, I made a simple DIY woven heart burlap pillow.

This pillow is really easy to make although it did take a little more time than I thought it was going to initially. I spent 2-3 hours per day for about 3 days working on the weaving of the heart.  It wouldn’t have taken me so long if I didn’t do such a tight weave, but I really liked the look of it.

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For this project you will need:

• White/cream colored burlap
• Pink yarn
• Fabric for the liner and back of pillow (I used Muslin)
• 14” zipper
• Large eye blunt needle
• Scissors
• Cutting mat, rotary cutter and 24″ ruler – this is optional, you can just use scissors to cut your fabric but this makes cutting fabric so much easier!
• Sewing machine
• Thread
• Pillow insert – I use a Fdjrarar down pillow insert from Ikea.

My pillow inserts are 20” square so I cut my burlap to 21” square.  I wanted a little extra hanging over “just in case”.  😉  Of course, I could always trim it down later.

I already had a heart decoration that I will be using on my Valentine’s Day mantel so I used that as the stencil to draw my heart on the burlap. You could always just print out a heart on paper and trace it.  I used a pencil to trace the stencil because I wanted a very light line.

 

I started weaving the yarn at the point of the heart, skipping two squares of the burlap between each weave.  The edges of the heart ended up being more or less sometimes depending on how it worked out.  I staggered the two squares on each line.  To make things go a little bit faster, I would rock my needle back and forth between the squares in the burlap as you can see in the picture above.

 

Pull through a bunch of yarn to work with and when you get to the end, leave a little tail on the backside and tie that off to the next piece of yarn. Here is what the back of the heart looked like.

 

I cut one piece of Muslin 20”x20” for my lining on back of the burlap.  Center this on the backside of your burlap piece.  When you have it positioned in the center, pin it down so it doesn’t shift when sewing.

 

I sewed around the edge of the muslin.  I kept the seam allowance very small because I did not want the seam to show on my pillow after it was sewn together.  

On this pillow, I sewed a zipper into the back instead of along the bottom seam.  I thought it would be too hard having the burlap in the seam as well.  This uses the same method as my easy zippered pillow cover tutorial, but instead of sewing the zipper into the seam of the front and back panels, you will essentially make two panels from the backing piece.

Cut your backing piece 20”×21”.  Cut 5” off the 21” side so you should now have two pieces, a 5×20” piece and a 16×20” piece.  Sew these pieces right sides together using a ½” seam allowance.  Sew your zipper onto the seam using the same method as the easy zippered pillow cover tutorial.

 

Now all you have to do is sew the front and back right sides together using a ½” seam allowance.  Trim the burlap on the edges if necessary.  Turn the pillow cover right side out, poke out the corners and insert your pillow.

I am really happy with it turned out.  It is so cute! I love the texture the yarn gives, the subtlety of the colors and the simple design.

I hope you like this pillow as much as I do.  It is really an easy one to make, I encourage you to try it as well.  I also thought this would be a super cute pillow for a little girl’s room.  Unfortunately, we don’t have any little girls around here.  🙁  It really could work as decor anytime of the year.

I am excited to share my Valentine’s mantel with you as well.  I will be back later in the week to do that.  🙂