DIY Pillow Ideas – Painted Fall Pillow

I love the new DIY Pillow that I made with paint and Free Motion Embroidery! I Combined Two Of My Favorite Passions, Art And Sewing. Now I have a new Painted Fall Pillow.

I had a  lot of big deadlines due last week. As soon as I was done I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to be creative and make something. So I made a DIY pillow. 

I made my pillow using a pillow cover, acrylic paint, and my sewing machine. I used free-motion stitch embroidery to sew in the details.

What is Free Motion Stitch Embroidery?

Free motion machine embroidery is very different from regular sewing. By using a special quilting foot and lowering the feed dogs, you feed the fabric wherever you want to stitch. It’s so much fun because you can move the material in any direction while sewing it on your machine.

A  lot of free-motion embroidery is done slowly and perfectly. I love it when it is more free and outside of the lines. Can I  just say how much fun this was to make?

Check out the video of how to make my painted fall pillow.

What You Need to Make a Painted Fall DIY Pillow

Pillow Cover – I used the IKEA Gurli pillow cover

Sulky Brown Embroidery Thread (Dark Brown)

Free motion quilting foot for your machine (varies by sewing machine brand)

Mark B Gone Washable Pen

Acrylic Paint – I used Alizarin Crimson, Cad Yellow Medium,  Brown, Light Green, Dark Green, and White.

Leaf  Pattern (right-click on Leaf Pattern and choose the “Save Link as…” option to download the file.) 

You can tell that I use my paints frequently. 

How to Make a Painted Fall DIY Pillow

I  left a link to the photo of these leaves above. Just right-click on Leaf Pattern and choose the “Save Link as…” option to download the file. I resized the leaves and made them larger to about  5″. Once you have done that, print the leaves.

Cut out the leaves individually and arrange them out on the pillow cover.

Place the leaves inside the pillow cover and arrange them in the order you want them. Using a Mark B Gone water-soluble pen, trace the outside of the leaf patterns onto the fabric. The pen is washable. In fact, if you just tap it with a wet cloth, the color will remove immediately.

When you are done, your pillow should look like this.

Place some heavy plastic (I used recycling material) inside the pillow cover. You need this because when you paint on the topside, you don’t want the paint to leak through to the backside.

Mix your paints to get the colors you want and loosely paint around the traced lines. I like it when it isn’t perfect. Messy is good.

This is what my pillow looked like after I painted it. Don’t panic, just remember how good this looked when the pillow is done, (I posted another photo since you might have forgotten.)

See, it looks much better with the stitched embroidery.

Once the pillow is dry you need to add the machine stitch embroidery. This is what the sewing machine pressure foot looks like. To stitch the flowers, place your printed leaf nearby and stick the veins of the leaf as seen in the photo, The good thing is that this does not have to be perfect. I like ti better if it’s not perfect.

Can you believe the difference between the painted only leaves and the stitched leaves?

Here is a closeup. See what I mean about it is messy? I wasn’t kidding.

This is what the pillow looked like after stitching. Iron the pillow afterwards to flatten out the pillow cover.

This is our dining room. You can see that I got my inspiration from all of the florals I got from Amazon Home.

I love this pillow so much! And it was not hard to make.

Here are two other pillows I made with paint and free motion stitch embroidery.

Pin the image below to your Craft or fall decor boards on Pinterest (just click the Pin button in the top left corner). You can also follow along with me on Pinterest!

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