Christmas Deer Pillows

I somehow got it in my head that I wanted to make Christmas deer pillows to add some red to our great room and to go along with our more modern joy sign that I made last year.  Also, my super sweet husband gifted me with one of these guys from Target in November as a little surprise treat, and it was inspiration for my pillow project as well:

So with inspiration and materials in hand, I went to work creating some deer pillows.  The first step was finding a deer image online that I could reproduce by hand.  I measured my pillows and determined how big I wanted my deer head to be on the pillow, and I used that size as a guide to create a deer template out of poster board.  I only drew half of the deer head, and then I folded the poster board in half and cut out my drawing to get a completely symmetric deer head.  

Here is my deer template:

 The rest was easy and involved pinning the template onto white fleece fabric.  I cut around the template again to create a white fleece deer head that I then ironed on (using the same process as Charm's Anchor Pillow) to a red pillow cover that I sewed using material left over from Charm's birthday party and some white piping.  I used leftover Steam A Seam fusible web to adhere the deer heads to the pillows.

Here are the two pillow covers before the inserts were placed inside and the bottom side was hand sewn shut:

 And here is the after:

Simple and festive!!