Modern DIY Pillow covers made with Cricut and iron-on vinyl! Sharing the how-to, the simple design, and tips for making your own.
Have you seen those memes going around about throw pillows being adult women’s stuffed animals? My husband always jokes about how many I have, but it’s just fun to change it up from time to time and throw pillows can be one of the most affordable and easy ways to do that from season to season.
Since I do like to change them up and since my kids treat them like fort building fodder, I try to keep them cost effective. I snag plain pillow covers from either IKEA or H&M Home in neutral colours and like to dress them up with some DIY. Today I’m partnering with Cricut to share these two modern lines pillow designs that I’ve made using my Cricut Joy! They were done in under an hour and my husband has commented a few times already that they’re his new favourites… which if you knew how many pillows I have, that’s an accomplishment ;)
Alright, let’s get to the tutorial!
*This post has been sponsored by Cricut, but all opinions are my own- I only share brands I love and use on my own as well. See all my policies here.
For this project, you’ll just need a plain pillow case (these ones are 20×20″), iron on vinyl, and a Cricut machine to cut the design. If you have a Cricut, you can use this design from Cricut Design Space right here.
If you are making this design yourself, you just need to grab some square shapes and unlock them to stretch them into thick lines or thin rectangles. If you’re grouping the lines together like I did in chunks of 3 or 4, you can select those and click ‘attach’ so that they will cut with that spacing on your material.
I used Cricut’s Smart Iron-on for this so I didn’t need to use a mat. This is so handy and saves some time, but if you wanted to use a material you already have on hand or that doesn’t come in a Smart Material, you can definitely still use a mat with the Cricut Joy– but it’s definitely one of the features I love!
Load up your machine and hit go! It was fun to watch this cut with all the straight lines, it wen’t so quick. Normally I’d walk away while it cuts, but not this time. It took just a few minutes to cut the designs for both pillows. Since the Cricut Joy can cut continuous smart material, I didn’t have to load and unload mats- just the one piece of material for the whole project!
Then it’s time for weeding, again this went super quick thanks to the straight lines. I cut the lines into sections of 3 or 4 as I’d arranged them on the canvas.
ThenI lined them up on the pillow to get my spacing how I liked before using my Cricut Easy Press to iron on the designs to the pillow.
For the 100% cotton pillow covers with Every Day Iron-On, using 315 degrees for 30 seconds worked perfectly! If you have a different combination of materials, you can use this guide to always get the recommended settings when your’e applying iron-on. I’ve bookmarked that page on my phone… it really is handy!
Let them cool completely before peeling back the backing and revealing your new pillow design! I’m honestly obsessed with these pillows… especially the ivory one with the smaller lines… it’s perfect! I used the Parchment color of Cricut Iron-On vinyl for that ivory pillow and I used the Clay color for the grey pillow.
Look at how great they look in with the sofa! I’m so happy with how these turned out and am planning to order more of that Parchment vinyl so I can make a second one of those DIY modern pillows.
LIKE IT? PIN IT!
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