Christmas pillows

Since we've been married, I've been saying that I would make Christmas pillows. This year was apparently THE year for that to happen for real, and I went really unintentionally woodsy with the ones I've created so far (oh, there will be more and they will not be woodsy). 

The reindeer pillow was really quite simple. I found an image of a reindeer outline that I liked and traced that on a piece of fabric with a regular pen (I don't have those fancy fabric markers). Then I threaded my little embroidery needles (mine are actually tapestry needles - the embroidery ones looked too skinny to really thread) with navy floss and stitched away. My first foray into embroidery was for a Christmas present this year so I don't have a solid technique down, but I did look at Pinterest to see how the stitches seem to work on embroidered items and made it up as I went along. I embroidered while watching Christmas movies with Carson, and from tracing to my final stitch, it was a simple project, maybe 30 minutes? 

The next day, I sewed a cover for a pillow form I had on hand and voila! A reindeer pillow! I want to sew a red nose on him. Carson talked me out of it, and now I want to again. 

This pillow was the easiest of easy projects. I had a little pillow form (maybe 10x10? I didn't actually measure anything) and traced the shape of that onto one of Carson's old shirts (given with permission). I didn't cut anything right away, just sewed that little square shape through both sides of the shirt, discovered that I'd measured correctly, and then cut the rest of the shirt away. I want to raid thrift stores for old shirts now because this is the easiest way to make pillows. No stitching up that one side after stuffing a pillow? Finally! Do this project. I would say it took 10 minutes, but that might be an exaggeration. Five? Three? Okay, maybe seven minutes. 

 Is this picture animated for you? I didn't do it on purpose but I went to put pictures in this post and noticed that there's snow falling in the picture. Google, what did you do???!!!