A few years ago,  I had a small booth in a local Antique Shop.  The owners were also agreeable to put in handmade items.  I decided to put together my sewing skills with my painting skills and create some pillows and pillow shams for children’s rooms.  I had several yards of blue and white ticking as well as red and white ticking.  I don’t have pictures of the actual steps I used to create these but I can give them to you and show the final results.

First I decided what size and shape of the pillows I wanted to make.  Then I played around with a design until I got what I wanted.  Once that was done, I put the design on tracing paper and pinned it to the unfinished top of the pillow.  I used a temporary adhesive to attach the fabric to a piece of foam core so I would have a hard surface to paint on.  I placed a piece of  graphite paper under the tracing paper and I transferred the design to the fabric.  Using acrylic fabric paint and a fairly stiff brush, I blocked in the design and added a few highlights and some shading.   When this was dry,  I used a permanent marker and outlined the design and added some words.   Once they were completely dry, I finished the pillow sewing the front to the back and adding trim if needed.

These are simple patterns and you could even get patterns from children’s coloring books and use most any fabric, however, smooth surface fabric would be best, like cotton.  If you choose cotton just wash and press it first to get the sizing out ( so the paint will adhere better) and to preshrink it. Here are pictures of the results.

 These are obviously for little boys.

These are for little girls.  In both cases I also show a couple of pillow shams.  The flowers on these were painted freehand without a pattern, along with the vases.

Here are some photos of individual pillows.  This one of the bunny was created for a good friend of mine for her granddaughter.   It, of course, is on a different fabric and was a little more involved with shading and highlights.

I am showing you the back and front of this pillow, because I added some writing to the back.

On this pillow, I added some writing on the front and some waves to give some added interest to the tug boat.

 This is the last picture, I used a bright fabric for the back as well as for the flange on the sides along with some rickrack.

I hope you have enjoyed this post and it has given you some ideas on creating fun and decorative pillows for the kids in your family or friends.  Deciding on colors and fabric is the hardest part of this project.  Enjoy!!!