Stenciled Pillows Dress Up a Room

I had these pillows that I bought at Ikea with their linen covers. I like them but they are so boring, and just, well, white. Why not stencil some dandelions on them? Stenciled pillows are an easy afternoon project that can dress up a room.

I took the covers off of the pillows and laid them flat on a surface that would be okay if a little paint got on it — I’m not always neat with paint!

Put a piece of paper or plastic inside the pillow cover, so that when you paint it doesn’t bleed through to the back of the pillow. I used a piece of waxed paper – it’s easy and cheap.  I also like to use a piece of waxed paper for my paints – makes for easy clean up!

Here are the paint colors I’ve picked – a golden yellow and red. I use DecoArt fabric paints. For this project, I used stiff stenciling brushes to dab the paint on the pillow covers for stenciled pillows.

I like to tape my stencil to my fabric with painters tape so that it doesn’t move. Painters tape doesn’t leave any residue. I do take the tape off as soon as the project as done, so that no residual stickiness ends up on my project.

This stencil is Dandelion by the American mixed media line from DecoArts.

Ready to stencil! I started with the golden yellow, and then added touches of the red in places to add visual interest and a little more design to the stencil. You can see I picked the centers of the dandelion to highlight with the red.

Once it was almost dry, I carefully pulled off the stencil and let the paint dry thoroughly – overnight – before I worked with the stenciled pillows.

I did want to do both pillows, and wanted them to mirror each other. When I finished the first one, I thoroughly washed the stencil and dried it. I turned it over so the second pillow would be mirror / reverse the first pillow since they are at either end of my love seat.

Here they are, all finished and on my love seat! They look great with my big orange ruffled pillows!