DIY Monogram Bedroom Pillows

You cannot possibly know how excited I am to be finished with this project.  I’ve been working on it all week and my house has been in total disarray with fabric, fabric scraps, and thread creeping everywhere.  I’ve been a pillow making, money saving madwoman at my sewing machine.  I almost threw in the towel once or twice and headed to Bed, Bath, and Beyond to buy pillows, but I finally finished the project today.

I am a happy woman with a clean living room.  I ended up making a bedroom pillow set to complement a sham we recently purchased from Bed, Bath and Beyond.  The pillow set at Bed, Bath and Beyond would have cost us upwards of $250 as it cost $50 for a single sham cover, not including all of the extra pillows and the blanket.

Arriving with a nice bedspread and decent pillows has been a long journey.  When we first got married, my mom gave us a duvet cover but somehow the shams that matched were lost, so for a long time we only had a duvet cover.  Eventually, I bought what I thought was a duvet cover but ended up being a comforter.  I couldn’t wash it, so eventually, it had to go.

Most recently, I purchased this really nice duvet cover from Bed, Bath and Beyond (using a 20% off coupon, of course).  But I refused to pay around $250-300 for shams!  So I decided to make my own, only it’s taken me a long time to get to it.  So for the last month and a half our bed has looked like the following:

Talk about mismatched pillows and a mess!  I finally decided to get with it and make my own pillows so we could enjoy a nice, relaxing bedroom.  My grandma and grandpa gave me a JoAnn’s gift card for my birthday and I used it to buy the blue, white and tan fabrics.  I already had all of the pillows and sewed my own covers for them with the fabric I purchased.  The monogram pillows were $5 each at Wal-Mart (see the tan pillow above), I had the sham pillows from our previous bedspread, and the two square white pillows I purchased for $2 at the thrift store on base (you can see them sitting on the couch in my Craigslist living room makeover).

The “&” pillow is one I purchased from Wal-Mart a while back.  The back of that pillow has green embroidery, so I just flipped it over and hand stitched the “&” with the same fabric I used for the shams.  I originally intended to make the T and N pillows like little Scrabble letters, but when Nate told me both of our initials are only worth one point, I decided that was boring and just stuck with the letters.

I’m pretty happy with the pillows because they are unique, vintage, and in my favorite calming, blue color.  The best part, of course, is that I spent no money out of pocket!  There is nothing more rewarding than deciding to not pay a crazy amount for something and then figuring out how to do it oneself!  If anyone is interested, I can post a tutorial on how to make the monogram letters and the “&” pillow.