Front Porch — Domestic Imperfection

Crazy Easy Placemat Pillows (and Napkin Pillows and Dropcloth Pillows)

So pillows. We all love them and use them. We like them for comfort, we like them for decoration, we like them to add pops of color on our neutral colored couches. The more the merrier really…except for one little problem.

Throw pillows are freakin expensive.

Not like Rolex and Mercedes expensive, but even cheap pillows are $20-$30 a pop. I’ve seen plenty a pillow go for well over a hundred bucks and that is insane….especially in my house where they are just going to get peanut butter and boogers wiped all over them.

Well I have a solution. A looong time ago I showed you how to make your own envelope closure pillow, but this tutorial makes that one look like a rubix cube. Did you know you can make one in about 10 minutes, without a showing machine, for under $5? Sounds too good to be true doesn’t it? It’s not…please allow me to blow your mind.

It all starts with a placemat (or two). I found these beauties at World Market for about $4 a pop.

The key is to get a placemat that has two layers…not all placemats have this, but many do. The layers will be sewn together all beautifully on about 90% of the border, but there will be one little section where you can see the stitching. All you do is open that up with a seam ripper (or whatever you have that works, I may or may not have used a steak knife before).

Then you stuff it. You can buy pillow stuffing at craft stores, the bag below was $1.50 at Hobby Lobby (it was on sale for 50% off) and I used one bag for two placemat pillows.

Then just stitch up the hole and BAM, you have a beautiful pillow that looks like it cost you way more than four dollars and change.

That’s it! I have never before and may never again do a tutorial that is so easy. Now if your anything like me (and I’m assuming you are since your here) you will be double checking placemats for double layerness everywhere you go. It’s okay, embrace it.

I’m far from done with this post though, this is actually an update on my lonely built-in bench.

It needs a lot of pillows, so a lot of pillows it will get.

So, next up we have napkin pillows. These are just cheap single layer napkins, they are pretty much just a square of raw fabric except that the edges are already hemmed.

If you want a large pillow you can just sew them together, I wanted smaller lumbar pillows so I sewed then in half (all but one short edge), stuffed them, and sewed then closed.

My pillows are going outside, so a gave them a few good coats of waterproofing fabric protector. I cannot vouch for how well this stuff actually works, but I had it lying around so I figured what the heck.

Lastly we have dropcloth pillows (made with leftovers from this project). These are NOT ten minute pillows because there is nothing “premade” about them…but fear not, they are still simple and totally doable. To make these I followed my own envelope closure tutorial. I’m not going to give you another full tutorial, so if you want to know your going to have to click on the link above (after you finish reading this post of course).

I thought big bold stripes would look nice paired with the above pattern, so I grabbed some masking tape and spray paint and went to town. This was my first time spray painting fabric and I have to tell you, it works really really well. I got really crisp lines…no bleeding, no smearing, dries fast, looks great. It’s also cheap, easy and quick. I’m pretty sure I’ll be painting more fabric in my future.

Since these pillows were getting an envelope closure they can’t just be stuffed, they need a pillow form. Do you know how much they want for a large pillow form at Hobby Lobby? Almost twelve bucks! Ummm, NO….so I made my own for about $1.50 a piece.

I painted a few more dropcloth pillows and tried to copy some of the elements in the placemat design.

Here they are adding some life to my bench! For all eight of them (including the two napkin ones not pictured) I spent right around twenty bucks. Not too shabby.

We are making progress!

In fact, the only real similarity in the pictures above is that they both include a pantsless toddler. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Built-In Outdoor Bench

You know how everyone has a spot in their house that just seems to collect stuff? That place that is everyone’s dumping ground? Perhaps it’s your entryway, mudroom, kitchen counters or your garage. Ours is our front porch. Yup, right out there in the open.

Let’s just pretend for a second that I’m not a giant redneck who stores all her stuff on the front porch. Let’s pretend this is a normal home decor blog where I don’t show you horribly truthful pictures. Are you pretending? Okay then, here is my before picture…

Not so bad right? A little empty and a little plain, but nothing to cringe at.

The porch has been much better since we built a garage, really it has. The problem was that I had a ton of chairs sitting around from my $100 porch project (that I never finished), so even when the porch was spic and span there was still like six chairs in the corner. Adam wanted to get rid of everything and start from scratch, so we gave all the chairs away to family…including these three bad boys.

Yup, even the dumpster rocker (which was looking a little worse for wear). I did hold onto this one though, because it’s sturdy and NOT miniature sized.

Adam decided a bench was in order, something that would seat multiple people and NOT move… because we saw what happens when furniture is allowed to move around on our front porch. The goal was to have it done before Thanksgiving so we could all sit outside and enjoy a nice cold drink…of sweet tea that is. Because everyone knows that late November is the perfect time for some front porch sitting and some catch phrase playing with the fam.

So here is a quick tutorial that is mostly pictures, because everyone’s bench will be a little different (sizes and whatnot) and a general idea is really all you need. Our bench is eight feet long and used three cedar 2×6′s, four cedar 2×4′s, and a few feet of scrap pine.

First Adam measured and cut everything and put together the frame. He used cedar around the edges and the scrap pine (ours was leftover from our DIY garage foundation) on all the parts that wouldn’t be seen. Your free to use cedar for this, we just used pine because we’re cheap.

Then Adam, his dad, and Elijah spent a good chunk of time trying to locate the studs on the outside of our house, which evidently are not where they are supposed to be.

Once the studs were located they just screwed the frame directly to the wall and added the angled supports.

It looks like they were working in the middle of the night, but it was like 5pm. This getting dark early thing kills me…and it doesn’t even trick the kids into going to bed earlier. Such a waste.

So the next day Adam just screwed the three cedar 2×6′s to the top of the frame and coated it with some water sealer.

And there you have it, our unmovable bench…finished just in time for Thanksgiving.

The reason we stopped it at eight feet instead of extending to a less awkward length is twofold…1) the boards come in eight foot lengths, and 2) eight feet just so happened to stop exactly before the only outlet on our front porch.