Pottery Barn catalog is one of my favorite sources for decorating ideas and inspiration for creating “one of my own.” Sooo . . . when the Christmas catalog arrived and I saw this cute little Pottery Barn “Jingle” Pillow the wheels in my head began turning. In no time at all I had created a new pillow that was much kinder to my budget than the $39.50 Pottery Barn price!

In addition, I think the font on this pillow is actually cuter than Pottery Barn’s, with the added embellishment of tweeting birds and snowflakes!

Here is what you’ll need to put this together yourself:

Drop Cloth Fabric, Burlap or another fabric of your choice

A Pillow Form - or - Polyester Fiberfill

Jingle Bells

Iron-on Transfer Paper (I recommend Lesley Riley Tap which I purchased from Amazon.com. It really is the best!)

A Free Font From Dafont.com

This is the super cute font (KingthingsChristmas) that I chose from Dafont.com. This great website has hundreds of fonts available for download onto your computer’s word processing program. Most are free or “by donation” to the creator. The homepage at Dafont.com gives downloading instructions for your particular type of computer. For my PC I simply chose the font I wanted, hit “download” and saved it to my computer. Then I opened the font I’d just installed (if you have trouble finding it do a search). When you open it a page comes up with several lines. One line says “read this” and it gives guidelines for use of the font (most are for private use only). On another line is the font itself which you simply “open” and “install”. If your computer shows a “zipped” file just right click and “extract” to open the file.

The next step is to open your computer’s Word Processing program and type out your text, in this case the word “jingle”. After typing the text you’ll adjust your font size (this was 600) and color (red). I ended up with four pages and saved them in my pictures as a JPEG file.

The next step requires that you have Microsoft Publisher which, to me, is really worth having as I use it all the time. Open Publisher and choose a blank page size (8-1/2 x 11). “Insert” your saved picture onto the blank page (you will be inserting and flipping one page at a time). Highlight your text and click on “arrange”, “rotate or flip” and “flip horizontal”. Now you have a mirror image of your script and you are ready to print onto your iron-on transfer paper and then iron onto your pre-cut fabric. You can make your pillow any size you want but mine (and PB’s) is 12″x24″.

After ironing sew on a few jingle bells to the front of your pillow, stitch your pillow together, stuff (or add a pillow form) and sew bells to the four corners of your pillow.

My pillow looked perfect on Mr. OTN’s leather lounge chair. He loved it too. In fact, he missed it when it disappeared. SOLD! Yes, right out from under him. I will be making him another though. Super cute! Super easy! Super cheap! My kinda’ holiday craft. Do you have a favorite idea catalog? What kinds of “knock-offs” have you tried? I think it would be fun to have a “knock-off” party. What about you?

Blessings to you,