Monograms on pillows have been a rising trend in home décor for some time now. While they make quite a statement, they can also come at quite a price due to the personalization it entails. If you’re in love with the trend and have been looking for a way to make the same bold statement in your own space, you’ll be pleased to know you can achieve the same look for a fraction of the cost. The secret? Heat ‘N Bond and a few key Fiskars tools.

As you’ve probably seen from the popular store-bought pillows, the monogram trend has spilled over into punctuation statements, as well. Today, I’ll be showing you three different samples of how you can create your own monogram pillows that have a fun, trendy look and one of them even features a punctuation mark. Let’s get started!

Gather your supplies: Heat ‘N Bond – Lightweight, Micro tip Scissors, Detail Cutting Knife, Cutting Mat, Rotary Cutter, Quilting Ruler, Fabric, Coordinating Thread, Sewing Machine, Pins, Pillow Form, Ironing Board, and Iron.

You’ll need to use your quilting mat, rotary cutting tool, and quilting ruler to square up your fabric. Add 1” for seam allowances when cutting your fabric for the front of the pillow.

Since I’ve made all of my pillows as slipcovers for easy removal, there is just a small amount of extra work for the back pieces. The fabric measurement you’ll need is the width of your pillow form, plus 6” (1” for the seam allowance and 5” for the overlap). So if your pillow form is an 18” pillow, you’ll cut a rectangle 18” x 24”. Then cut this piece in half giving you two pieces measuring 18” x 12”. These are your backing pieces that will create the opening to stuff the pillow into.

Hem one 18” side of each backing piece by folding the edge over ½” and ironing, then folding over that same edge again, iron, and stitch close to the inside edge.

To create a template for your monogram, type your letter or punctuation mark into a word processing program. Before printing it enlarge the font until you have the desired size. Cut out the monogram using scissors and/or a detail knife to cut intricate letters. This will become your template. (Tip: You can find thousands of unique fonts that are free to download at dafont.com)

Cut a piece of Heat ‘N Bond – Lightweight slightly larger than your template and iron the textured side onto the BACK side of your fabric following the packaging instructions. Then place your template REVERSED onto the slick side of the Heat ‘N Bond and trace using a ballpoint pen. Cut out along your traced lines using Micro tip Scissors. Peel backing off your monogram and place centered on your 18” fabric square, smooth wrinkles, and iron in place.

Lay your pillow front face up on your work surface and smoothing wrinkles. With the right side of the fabric facing down, match up the corners of one backing piece with the corners of the pillow front on the left side and pin. Continue to pin along the top, side and bottom edges. Then lay the remaining backing piece on the right side and pin. Sew along all 4 sides using a ½” seam allowance.

To ensure crisp corners, trim corners at a 45-degree angle, turn slipcover right side out, and push out corners using a small blunt object, like a pen cap. Slip pillow inside.

A punctuation pillow is just one variation of a monogram pillow, but for this next one I thought I’d take monograms to the extreme and create a family of monograms using a larger sized font for the last name initial, a capital letter for the husband and wife’s initials, and lowercase letters for the children’s initials. I also added in another ampersand for good measure.

This type of pillow takes a little extra planning and maybe a few extra trips to the printer to get the font sizes to look just perfect and balanced. The steps to create the pillow are the same you’ll just have more templates to trace and cut and need to use a little extra care when ironing the Heat ‘N Bond covered fabric pieces to the pillow front.

All the extra work is totally worth the effort though. Since this pillow is more playful, I decided to add a corduroy print as the backing

And for the last variation, I decided to show how to make the monogram pillow look just a bit more homespun and comfortable instead of so polished.

To do so, I chose to do a light monogram using a tone on tone fabric, bonded to a darker fabric background. To play up the monogram a bit, I stitched around the monogram letter using thread in the same color of the monogram letter and a short zigzag stitch.

Whichever variation you choose you’ll be keeping up with current decorating trends without breaking the bank!