Years ago, I saw a Christmas pillow that was similar to this one on Pinterest. I made the Christmas version and gave it as a gift. I’ve always wanted to make one for myself. It inspired me to make a homey. winter version. This shoe bench is the spot in my house that I’ve been putting my Kimberbell bench pillows.

Here are a few of the pillows I put on our shoe bench.

This bench pillow is a kit that I purchased from Kimberbell. It’s called Sweet as Pie. The kit comes with the embroidery files for machine embroidery, directions, and all of the fabrics. There were a few pink and purple fabrics in the kit, but I swapped those out for red. The files for the machine embroidery background quilting are a separate purchase, but they are too cute to pass up.

This bench pillow is also a kit from Kimberbell. This one is called Two Scoops. Again, I bought the DVD, instructions, fabric, and the embellishment kit all together. Again, the background machine embroidery files were a separate purchase. This bench pillow is so adorable. The ice cream truck has a little music box and when you push it, it plays music like an ice cream truck would.

This bench pillow was also from Kimberbell, and it was probably the easiest I’ve done.

The next bench pillow was the reason I got into machine embroidery. The block on the far left is a hot cocoa stand. I took a class at Quilting Mayhem to make that block into a kitchen towel. I absolutely fell in love with machine embroidery and had to upgrade my machine to be able to make these beautiful pieces of art. The bench pillow, from Kimberbell, is called Candy Cane Lane. And, yes, those are little battery operated lights.

I can’t remember where I bought this bench pillow kit from. It was the first pillow I made with machine embroidery.

This was the Christmas pillow I made that inspired me to make my current bench pillow. I saw something similar on Pinterest and decided to whip one up!

That brings us back to the bench pillow I finished up this weekend! I made this with 4 mini charm packs. I fell in love with this fabric WAY back when I first discovered fabric stores that carry designer lines of fabric. Precuts were new to me and I bought four of them for later use. Well, “later use” was finally this weekend! The fabric line is called Double Chocolat, from Moda, by 3 Sisters.

I sewed the squares together and then did my embroidery on tan strips.

I needed an easy, sort of mindless, quilting project over the break. This one checked all of the boxes.

Happy quilting.