Pinterest Challenge: Pillows!

My blog crush, Bower Power and the always fantastic Young House Love are doing it again. If I am being honest, I didn't know if they were going to do the winter edition of the Pinterest Challenge. I mean, it is March. No worries though, I am just so happy that it is back! AND it came at such a perfect time. I am recovering from being sick, so I didn't want to be around people AND the hubby was working late. This made for a perfect Friday night activity.

The purpose of the challenge is to stop pinning and start doing the things we pin.  As of right now I have 447 pins- much like all of you, it includes everything from recipes to sewing projects to those fantastic nail polish pins. (Really, how do they do that??) And like most of you, I have actually done about 1% of the things I have pinned.

I made this little deal for the fall challenge, and it has consistently been one of my most viewed posts. For this go around, I looked through my DIY board and noticed a butt load of pillow pins and I knew that was what I was going to be doing. In August (ish) we I painted my living room a dark grey color. I still really like the color, but man, dark grey is kind of depressing when you are going through winter in Oregon. Grey on the inside, grey on the outside. And now that all the Christmas decorations are down, there is nothing on the walls to break up the grey. I figure that a few fun pillows on the couch will add just enough pop to brighten the room up.

The first pin that jumped out to me was this guy. Here's the link to the original post, but no joke... it's in Chinese.

Luckily I am a visual learner, and there were some pretty clear and semi-wordless directions on the original pin. I took pictures of what I did, but really their pictures/directions are so much more clear than what I could come up with.  Here's my version:

I posted a picture of this on Facebook right when I was finished with it. My super nice friends were giving it so many likes and comments I thought it was my birthday or something.

The flower is made up of felt circles (3 1/2 inches in diameter and 2 1/2 inches) then cut in half. They got sewed on to the fabric so that they overlapped each other. Then I sewed the pillow and stuffed it with poly-fill.
After a couple of rows of flower petals, I realized (and maybe some of you will say "duh") that if I stopped the machine when I was about 1/2 to 3/4 of the way through a petal, if I lifted the foot (with the needle down) I could add the next petal and turn the fabric slightly to line it up. Then I repeated about a billion more times. This made the sewing part much quicker than sewing each petal on individually. I did a couple of rows with the larger petals and then switched to the smaller size.

For my second pillow, I wanted to do this "super easy no-sew pillow cover" from here :

Let's just say "super easy" is not how I would describe it. I gave up after 45 minutes. So I turned back to my boards and found this:

When I looked through the tutorial I realized a couple things: a) this would be the most complicated thing I have ever sewn and b) this tutorial was super clear and gave easy, detailed directions and pictures for each step. So, I took a deep breath and went for it, and ta-da!

I literally had my lap top next to me the entire time I was making this, double checking each step from her tutorial, so I won't bother to post my step by step. But I love it. It's a little loose on the pillow because my measurements weren't as exact as they could have been, but I am still really happy with how it turned out.

Here they are together :)

Check out all the projects over at Bower Power, Young House Love, Hi Sugarplum, and The Great Indoors. If you want to play along, click on over, read all the details and get on it!