The other day I was shopping in Home Goods looking for a birthday gift for my co-worker.  One thing you may have noticed about me is that I don’t shop in ‘real’ stores all that much.  Sure, I go to lots of garage sales and estate sales and I hit up Target every now and then for the basics, but I rarely shop retail home decor stores.

But there I was in Home Goods and somehow I ended up in the throw pillow aisle where I found these.

Before I knew it, they had jumped into my cart.

I loved the nubby linen in shades of cream and beige.  I thought they would look pretty awesome with some grain sack stencils on them.

One thing to keep in mind when choosing pre-made pillows to stencil is that they must have removable inserts.  Look for a zipper that will allow you to take the insert out before you stencil.

You’ll never get a crisp result trying to stencil on a pillow with an insert in place.

In fact, what I do is remove the pillow insert and replace it with a square of hardboard (the same stuff I use to make chalkboards in place of mirrors).  This gives me a nice flat, hard surface for stenciling, and also prevents any paint from bleeding through to the back side of the pillow.

In case you are wondering, I used Dixie Belle chalk style paint in Midnight Sky to do the stenciling.  The stencils came from Maison de Stencils, they have a fantastic selection of European grain sack style stencils.  When I last checked each of these designs were available for $8.50 to $9.

I am keeping a couple of these pillows for myself, but I’ll also be taking some in to Reclaiming Beautiful next week to sell.  Unless any of you locals want to snatch one up first.

In which case, be sure to check my ‘available for local sale‘ page!

And don’t forget, you have until tonight at midnight (central time) to leave a comment on last week’s post to be eligible to win the Prima Marketing modeling material and molds.  So if you haven’t left a comment on that post go back and do it now!