diy: geometric heart pillow

Every once in a while LM will come up to me and ask to sew. Most of the time this means I give her an embroidery hoop with a piece of scrap fabric and let her practice going up and down with a needle and thread making her own pattern, but this week she had a specific project in mind - a heart pillow. I was game and so we started to collaborate.

I fully admit that I kind of took over as the idea for a geometric color-blocked heart got me all inspired, but she approved the design with excitement. I quickly got to work drawing out a pattern based off of this one. Then I let her sit on my lap and help guide the fabric through the machine and stuff the pillow insert inside. The smile on her face was definitely worth all of the effort, but we also ended up with a really fun pillow for our living room that never would have been made without her!

We used an old pillow we had on hand for the insert and backing which helped speed things along nicely, so those were the measurements I used for the finished size. I didn't have to worry about adding any sort of closure since the back piece on the old pillow already had a zipper. This is an easy way to give a pillow you are tired of new life!

Below are some pictures of how I pieced the heart together. Using a 1/4" seam allowance you will end up with a heart about 9 1/2" x 10".

I scanned the geometric heart pattern below for your personal use. You can put all of the pieces together using the letter key on the picture above (you will need to cut 2 of a and f). Just click on the scanned images, save them to your computer, and print them out on a full sheet of 8 1/2 x 11 paper (if a shape is missing an edge that means it is the edge of the paper). Happy heart-making!