Burlap Coffee Bag Pillows

So, I thought to myself the other day, "what type of DIYer...pillow hoarder...burlap loving...coffee fanatic person has awesome burlap coffee bags sitting in her storage for over a year?" This one (pointing this.a.way.)...and I'm not proud of it. I can't believe I forgot all about these and didn't do anything with them the moment I got them. Who does that???

I love burlap coffee bags. I went to a restaurant in San Diego and the whole ceiling was covered in coffee bags. I.was.in.love. I wanted to take a few down for myself :) But I figured getting up on my chair in the middle of a restaurant and pulling down some bags wasn't something that I would do in front of my mom...of course, who knows, she probably would have helped me ;) ...and yes...I would have asked for permission, of course...maybe...maybe not. We'll never know. I guess it would have depended on how dark the corner was that my table was in....

Well, now I have my own burlap bags...and not from a ceiling in San Diego. I got these awesome bags from BurlapFabric.com. You may have heard of them. They are a little sponsor of mine. No big deal :) These coffee bags are huge. I could probably make at least two 18x18 or 20x20 covers out of them if I wanted to do the whole cover in burlap. I can get at least 4 (probably 5 if I strategically tried) covers out of them if I only used the front and scrap fabric for the back. That's a lot of pillow covers ..cute pillow covers...for a bag that cost around 2 bucks.

To get these from decent looking bags to cute little pillows, I cut the first piece out of the fabric at 19x19 inches to make an 18x18 inch pillow cover.

I then used some scrap pieces for the back and followed this same tutorial I used to make my rosette pillow...and well almost every other pillow cover in my house.

These pillows turned out perfect. The only problem was since I was making just the front pieces out of the coffee bag, only two of the pieces had actual writing on them. So, on one of the empty pieces, I just stenciled a 'raw coffee' on the bottom. I probably could have stenciled a lot more to give it the  authentic look of a bag (even though it really was still the bag)....see you can barely see it, maybe I'll have to add some more...

I didn't think burlap would look good in my new living room design, but I love it here. The darkness in the type on the pillows brings in the chair in the corner perfectly. It just pulls everything together.

The only problem is that my dog loves to destroy pillows when he lays down. He does the whole walk around in circles thing for like two minutes, and then digs at the pillows for another two minutes...does another few circles...digs...etc. Then lays down. By the time he is done, half the pillows are on the ground and the other half don't look like pillows anymore. So...I'm pretty sure these burlap pillows won't last too long on this couch. Who knows, maybe burlap will last longer than the other material. We'll see :)

p.s. this post is not sponsored by burlapfabric.com, but I did receive the bags for free, but was not obligated to do this post because of the bags...I just wanted to :) And because burlap coffee bags are pretty darn awesome and thought you should know of a good source to get them instead of stealing them off a random ceiling in San Diego.