Happy Valentine’s Day!! Do you have any big plans to celebrate the day? We usually lay low for this holiday, instead of going out, we choose to stay in and have a nice dinner at home. Much easier and less stressful! Besides, now that the kids are getting older, we can have a date night anytime we want! 🙂 I wanted to share one last project for Valentine’s Day. You saw this scrappy heart pillow when I shared my colorful Valentine’s Day mantel last week. Today I am going to share the tutorial for it.

This pillow was made to tie into my mantel but it is great on it’s own too. I think it could work for anytime of the year, not just Valentine’s Day since it not red and pink. It could work nice as a pop of color in a neutral theme. Realistically you can make all the hearts neutral if you didn’t want the color. Or make the colors whatever you want!

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For this project you will need:

• Drop cloth to use for pillows to give a vintage look
• Scraps of fabric for colored hearts
• 14” zipper
• Scissors & Pinking Shears
• 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• Sewing machine (this is a newer version of the one I use)
• Thread
• Dressmaker pins
• Pillow insert – I use a Fdjrarar down pillow insert from Ikea

The first thing you will need to do is to cut two 20×20″ panels from your drop cloth material. My pillow insert size is also 20×20″ but I like my pillow covers to fit a little snugger. If you want them more loose, you could cut your panels 21×21″.

I printed out some hearts of various sizes onto cardstock to use as a template. Click here for the heart templates I used.

After cutting them out, I traced them onto an extra piece of drop cloth. I traced multiples of each size so I would have plenty to arrange on my pillow front.

Since I was making the pillow to coordinate with my mantel, I also picked out some colored fabric out of my scraps. I traced some hearts of various sizes onto the colored fabric scraps as well.

The closest matching blue scrap I had was a kid’s print. So I just fussy cut a heart out of that. It ended up that I used the wrong side of the fabric because I liked the lighter color better. No one will be the wiser! Well except for you all!  😉

Cut out all the hearts. This is a good thing to do while watching some TV. I was catching up on The Crown on Netflix while I cut mine out! Is anyone else watching that? It is really good! 🙂 Next, I arranged the hearts on one of the drop cloth panels. Play with it a bit until it is to your liking. You can even overlap some of the hearts. I think it gives the pillow more dimension that way.

Now you will have to pin down the hearts to make sure they don’t fall off when you are sewing!

To sew the hearts on, I just lined up the edge of the heart with the inside right edge of my presser foot. This left me with about an 1/8″ raw edge around all of the hearts. This would be perfect for the fraying scrappy look I was going for. If you aren’t comfortable sewing with this scant of a seam allowance, another method would be to cut the hearts out leaving a 1/8″-1/4″ edge around the heart. Then sew right on the line. Either way works! 🙂

Using a smaller stitch length helps in sewing around curves. Make sure you are lifting your presser foot and turning your fabric often! You don’t want straight lines on a curve. Here is the stitch length I was using.

Make sure to back stitch at the beginning and end of sewing. Here are a couple of hearts after being sewn on. You can tell where I started and ended by the back stitching. This is a great place to start because you don’t want to start on a curve. I used a contrasting black thread to outline the shapes of the hearts. I felt like they would get lost on the pillow if I used a cream colored thread since I was using the same drop cloth for both.

Continue sewing on all the hearts. To assemble the pillow cover, I like to sew a zipper into my pillows. I find that this kind of pillow cover holds it’s shape better. You won’t have your pillow bulging out of the back like on an envelope pillow cover. I have an easy zippered pillow cover tutorial you can follow if you need help finishing the pillow. If you have never tried it, I think you will be a fan! 🙂

After sewing your pillow cover together, throw it into the wash. This will fray up those raw edges nicely to give the scrappy look we want. I do not dry my pillow covers however. Even though I pre-wash all my fabrics, I don’t want to take a chance of them shrinking more and/or fading. I just let them air dry.

After it is dry, put in your pillow insert and enjoy! It is such a fun pillow. I ♥ it! 🙂

Hope you have a great Valentine’s Day!