Monarch Butterfly Pillow

Hello Friends!

I told you I'd be back with another monarch butterfly project. This time, it's a pillow. A toss pillow, a throw pillow, a decorative pillow...call it what you'd like!

 

I, like most people who love interior design, also love a good pillow. A good pillow is such a workhorse; it can change the look of a room, it can brighten up a room, it can help reinforce a theme or a color scheme. The same pillow can even be used in different rooms. And when you get tired of that old pillow, don't get rid of it. Recycle it - put a new cover on it and put that pillow back to work!

 

I made this project with a combination of techniques and products: the butterfly design, iron on t-shirt transfers, my Silhouette Cameo, fabric I already had on hand, an iron, and a sewing machine.
I enlarged the black and white monarch butterfly and printed it on t-shirt transfer paper. I let the ink set for a few minutes while I cut my fabric to size (this is a 16" pillow, I cut it a bit snug at 16.5 inches but it worked...barely) and ironed it. Then I cut the paper design using the Silhouette.

 

I found the vertical center of the pillow, turned the printed side of the transfer paper down and centered it, then ironed away. It took very little time for the transfer to 'take' - maybe about 2-3 minutes. After the fabric was cool, I peeled off the paper back. I finished up with the sewing and then...a pillow was born.

 

I would have liked the butterfly to have been a pinch bigger but I was limited to about an 8x10 print area - cutting limitations of the paper size and the machine. With a large format printer, the media (paper, sticker paper, etc.) would be larger so the available cutting size would be, as well. Maybe I need to put a large format printer on my Christmas list. Who knows what might be possible then?

 

Files tomorrow!

 

~ M ~