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I absolutely love having the house decorated for the holidays. Actually doing the decorating, and then having to take the decorations back down, not so much. This year I got a few new decorations though so that makes things a little more fun. Recently my husband, son, and I met my parents in Yellowstone for about a week. Well, every time Kevin (my husband) saw a raven he would point and say “look, a black bird!” Needless to say he won’t be winning any bird identification awards but it sure did crack me up! Naturally, I had to add a few “black birds” to our Halloween décor this year.

I also got to add a couple of new Halloween pillows thanks to my mom. Apparently I am really good at starting projects for the holidays and then waiting years to finally complete them. In this post I mentioned my wood block decorations that ended up taking me two years to complete. You would think I would have learned my lesson but, nope!

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Way back in 2014 I found out about The Frosted Pumpkin Stitchery. I’ve known how to cross-stitch for a long time and I used to (and still do) love it. When I saw how stinking cute these designs were I just couldn’t resist! I had every intention of making them into Halloween pillow covers and I even finished one of the patterns well before Halloween. I wasn’t able to finish the second one however. Because the urgency to finish the project before Halloween was gone, the second one sat unfinished in a bag for another couple years before I pulled it out and completed the stitching. Once the counted cross-stitch was done the ‘finished’ stitching projects ended up in my fabric bin to be turned into pillow covers, where they sat until just last week. Mom came to visit and she knocked out a bunch of projects that were stuck sitting on my work-in-progress list for way too long!

We’ve made a just a couple cute Halloween projects for our business over the years *wink, wink* so I actually had quite the pile of absolutely adorable Halloween ‘scrap’ fabrics hanging around. Mom helped me put together the most adorable fabric combinations and she whipped up two absolutely adorable (if I do say so myself) pillows in one day. She did however make me cut the cloth for the cross stitch which was just a little terrifying. I guess that’s a pretty good price to pay for a project that sat unfinished for six years though. What would I do without my mom?!

It makes me so happy to see these pillows hanging out in my front room with all my other decorations. Those eagle-eyed readers may notice that there is a third Halloween pillow in these photos.

This one, with the crow, was made by my wonderful Aunt Linda to test a pattern I wrote up years ago! I have always loved this quilt block design, it just seems so cheerful somehow, and it reminds me of a star. To make it into a Halloween version, I took the raven from my Positively Bootiful quilt and resized it to fit on the center of the quilt block. Once upon a time we sold small pillow kits that had this pattern with it. Those kits sold out long ago but somehow I never got around to releasing just the pattern. In an effort to check one more thing off the work-in-progress list the time has come to officially release the pattern! I’d like to introduce you to “Gleam” a sweet Halloween pillow pattern.

In my pattern the directions teach you how to attach a backing that is the same size as the front using an invisible zipper. With a baby and a cat roaming my house (and my own not-so-graceful ways), non-washable pillow covers are a big no-no. However, for the pillow my Aunt made she followed the directions from our plush pillow pattern. This pattern creates a pillow with a wide border that wraps from the back to the front with self-mitering corners. (It also includes directions for inserting an invisible zipper.)

There’s still time to make some fun Halloween pillows for yourself, or recruit someone else to make them for you if you’re like me. It makes me so ridiculously happy to see these pillows hanging out in my house! I know this Halloween is probably going to look a little different than we all hoped or expected but I hope you can find a way to make it great. Also, I’m pretty sure that I need some new patterns from Frosted Pumpkin Stitchery to make some Christmas pillow covers. I have plenty of time to get them done before Christmas, right? Mom, wannna’ come visit again?