PATIO PILLOWS

We're in a drought here in SE Wisconsin, so the gardens are doing okay as long as you water them every other day.  But they are NOT thriving!  There's just nothing like rain water to make a garden grow.  The grass is burned out to a whitish yellow,  the flower blooms are smaller, and the rabbits are eating everything in sight.  They're thirsty too and I suppose my garden flowers give them something juicy to munch on.  Fortunately they have stuck with eating only two types of flowers in the garden (snapdragons and mallow) and the rest don't seem too attractive to them.  So it was time to bring some  artificial flowers/color to the patio.

I've posted about freezer paper stencils in the past, so you can see more examples here and here.  But all you need to do for these pillows is:

1.  Cut a free-form flower in your freezer paper.  Throw the center "flower shape" away.  Then iron the "flower frame" (shiny side down) onto your fabric choice.  You can cut any shape into your freezer paper.  Plus, this is something even small children could do!

 2.  Take some fabric paint and a sponge, or in my case, a can of indoor/outdoor spray paint.  I really like Valspar brand from Lowes - it has a really nice cap option and quite a few colors too.  I've never used spray paint on fabric before, but this paint is durable, just what the pillows need to be!

3.  Spray an even coat all over the stencil area.

 4.  Gently pull away the freezer paper once the paint is not shiny wet.

 5.  Ta Da!  You have a nice, crisp stenciled flower for your patio pillow top!  Flower shapes like this remind me of the 60s!

 I did another one  with a circle of freezer paper ironed in the center, to mask off that area.

 6.  Then just sew them to a backing fabric, plain or fancy, put your pillow form inside, and sew it shut.

 7.  Then invite some good friends over for a craft night and make some more!

8.  Or . . . invite some friends over for a craft night to make ANYTHING!  

That's what I'm doing.  Four of my book group friends will be arriving tonight with hammers and pine planks in hand for a summer evening of creating!  We'll save stenciled pillows for another night - tonight we're going to make quite a racket in the backyard with the sound of 5 hammers and my circular saw piercing the darkness!