Place Mat Pillows

I absolutely LOVE decorating for Christmas, and look forward to new and fun decorations every year.
However... unless you buy things on clearance after Christmas each year, which I sometimes do, you will find that the decorations are not cheap and can add up fast.
One of my favorite things to put out at Christmas are cute Christmas pillows!  You can add a little touch of Christmas to any room in the house when you just put out a pillow!  I love that, but pillows usually come with oddly high price tags, and I refuse to foot the bill for them!  Last year about a few pillows I fell in love with at Target for 75% off, and I cant wait to put them out this year, but I wanted to have a couple of others that I could spruce up the house with.

While wondering through Target one afternoon, I found the cutest place mats.  

I really liked them, but I am not a "place mat" kind of person!  We rarely put them out, mainly because I like a CLEAN table, and place mats tend to make my table look cluttered.  However, I really liked these place mats!  I picked on up to look at it, and realized it was an ideal Christmas pillow just waiting to be transformed!  These place mats were only $3.99 each, which is FAR cheaper than a pillow! (It seems that most decorative pillows run from $12.99-24.99 at Target.)
I bought 2 place mats, and headed home to begin a very short and super easy transformation of place mat to pillow!  I wanted one pillow to have the snowflake on top, and one to have the snowflake on bottom!

I grabbed my seam ripper, and broke one seam on each place mat.  

I broke the seam open just wide enough to fit my hand into the place mat.  

 These mats were really ideal because they were literally 2 piece of fabric sewn together, and 

I didn't have to do much. 

After breaking the seam open, I filled each place mat with poly-fil fluff. 

 I keep poly-fil on hand pretty much all of the time, so this wasnt something I had to purchase, but if you do not have any... DON'T FORGET to bring a 40% off coupon with you to your local craft store before purchasing!  JoAnn's and Michael's actually have APPS that you can download for free, and pull a coupon up on your phone in store!!  They honor each other's coupons too... so make sure you download both as each store usually has different coupons!

After filling the place mats, which are now pillows, I simply hand stitched the opening I had made shut with matching red thread.  

Total this project took me about 15 mins to make both pillows, and I love the finished project!!  I cant wait to put them out at Christmas...

Total Project cost $7.98... for 2 pillows!  I cant understand for the life of me why they charge so much for pillows!!  I feel like I outsmarted the pillow making people!!

 - Jessica