Holiday Pillow Wreath

Create a beautiful holiday pillow wreath this season! This is a simple sewing project perfect for fat quarters, charm packs and even fabric scraps. Grab the free template and create one to decorate your home or gift to someone special.

Hello! Today I have a fun sewing project to share with you – a holiday pillow wreath! This wreath is perfect for decorating your home this season and it also make a wonderful gift.

My mom taught me how to make these wreaths years ago. While growing up, she always hung one in our house around the holidays that matched our tree skirt and stockings and I absolutely loved it. When I had a house of my own my mom made me this pillow wreath as a Christmas gift and now I hang it up every holiday season. 

Now my mom and I now love making pillow wreaths for different holidays and seasons. I started working on making one for each month and am almost done! You can check out all of my Pillow Wreaths for more ideas. They are so easy to customize and make for any occasion. One Christmas I made pillow wreaths using fabric featuring our favorite football team. They made really great gifts for family members and friends! 

We usually make our pillow wreaths using about five different fabrics, but you can also make your wreath using a charm pack as I did for my August sunflower pillow wreath. Using a charm pack is great because all of the fabrics will coordinate together really beautifully. If you use five different fabrics, like we did for these Christmas pillow wreaths, you will need about a 1/4 yard of each fabric or a fat quarter for each. 

I hope you enjoy making this wreath! You can add sticks of cinnamon to a few of the pillows so the wreath will smell really good. They can be replaced each year to keep the wreath smelling fresh! The tutorial for how to make your own holiday pillow wreath is below along with a link to a template you can use. 

> Check out my Ultimate Guide to Making Pillow Wreaths for lots of great information!

How to Make a Holiday Pillow Wreath

Supplies Needed

• Free Pattern – Grab the free pattern by filling out the purple form at the end of this post.
• Fabric – 5 different fabrics. 1/4 yard of each is plenty.
• 12″ wire wreath form and heart-shaped wire wreath forms.
• Poly-fil Stuffing
• 3/8″ ribbon – I use 1/8″ ribbon for my mini charm pack pillows.
• Thread
• Point turner
• Pins
• Needle
• Fabric scissors (I also find small embroidery scissors are useful too!)
• Optional – cinnamon sticks

Making the Pillows

Step One: Create a cardboard pattern to use for cutting out all of your pillows or download the free template from my Resource Library. The pattern should measure 4.5″ x 5.5″.

Step Two: Cut out the fabric pillows.  For a 12″ diameter wreath, you will need between 30-35 pillows, depending on how full you want your wreath to look. For this wreath there are 35 pillows total, 7 pillows of each fabric. The template is for the entire pillow (it gets folded in half) and includes a 1/4″ seam allowance.

Step Three: Sew each fabric pillow. Fold the fabric in half for each pillow – right sides together, 4.5″ side to 4.5″ side. Sew with a 1/4″ seam allowance around all three sides of the pillow leaving an opening to stuff the pillow along the long side.

Trim the corners.

Turn the mini pillow right side out and use a point turner to gently push out the corners.

Step Four: Stuff each pillow and hand sew the opening closed.  Be sure not to overstuff the pillows making them too hard. This will make it harder to tie them on to the wreath form. Hand sew the opening closed with coordinating thread using a small whip stitch.

Assemble the Wreath

Step Five.  Tie the pillows onto the wreath. Start by cutting strips of ribbon to attach the pillows. I cut my ribbon into 8″ pieces. Before cutting all of your ribbon, test the length by attaching the first pillow to the wreath form. You may want to cut them a little longer to make tying the knots easier. 

Next, start tying the pillows to the outer ring. Each pillow will be wrapped around two wires of the wreath. 

For this pillow, I attached 13 pillows to the outer ring, 12 to the middle ring and 9 to the inside ring. The wreath my mom made for me had 32 pillows with 14 for the outer ring, 10 for the middle ring, and 8 for the inner ring. I tried to space out the colors so pillows of the same color aren’t clumped together or too close. If you need to move a pillow after it is attached, just slide it out of the ribbon and put a new one in.

Step Six: Add cinnamon sticks! Stick two cinnamon sticks in with three pillows along the middle ring of pillows. It sounds like back when these wreaths were popular in the 70s and 80s, they stuffed the pillows with cloves or nice smelling potpourri. I prefer to stick cinnamon sticks in this way, becaue they can easily be replaced when they stop smelling. 

Step Seven: Add a little ribbon loop to the back of the wreath so it can be hung up! And you are all done!

The great thing about these wreaths is you can use whatever fabric combinations you want.  It doesn’t have to be holiday to make a great gift!  If you enjoy this pillow wreath be sure and check out the other pillow wreaths I’ve made following this same tutorial. Here are just a few of my favorites!

Home Sweet Home Pillow Wreath

Sunflower and Bee Pillow Wreath

Back-to-School Pillow Wreath

Get the Free Christmas Pillow Wreath Pattern!

Fill out the purple form below with your first name and email address! The free file will be sent straight to your inbox! If you have already filled out the form below, don’t worry – you won’t be added to my list twice! This freebie is for personal use only. I hope you enjoy crafting something special. Please let me know if you have any questions :)