This post is sponsored by Cricut, but all thoughts, opinions and ideas are my own.

It’s one of my favorite things to be able to whip up cute holiday decor in minutes that looks incredibly awesome. I recently came into ownership of a Cricut Easy Press that makes doing just that a real cinch. One of the first projects I did? Making these super cute easy Thanksgiving pillows.

I’m sharing how I made them today, along with a free svg file to make one of your own!

Easy Thanksgiving Pillow Materials

The materials are pretty easy to come by–your local craft store or Amazon should have everything you need. (Affiliate links ahead–they help pay to make projects like these!)

• Cricut Iron-on foil in gold
• 5 sheets of felt in 4 shades of brown and rust felt
• 18×18 in Pillow cover (buy it here)
• Hot glue gun
• Free Joyful, Thankful, Blessed svg file (download here)

joyful, thankful, blessed pillow

If you’ve never used an SVG file before, it’s pretty easy. Once you’re in Cricut Design Space, open a new project and click on the button in the left hand column that says “Upload.” Choose your svg file and follow the directions on the screen from there. You’ll want to choose the “Joyful Thankful Blessed” graphic for this project and insert it into your canvas. It should come across sized correctly for placement on an 18x18in pillow.

Once you have the image on the canvas, select everything and click “weld.” This will make it so all the bits get cut out together in the way it should.

The tricky thing about iron on is remembering to reverse your image before you cut it out. On the left hand column there you can see the option to cut the mirrored image. Be sure to click that box before you hit go! Also, remember to put your Cricut Iron-on gold foil shiny side down for cutting.

Cricut also makes this really fun product called the Cricut Bright Pad. If your eyes are starting to get bad like mine are, it’s really a godsend to have a little help seeing the lines of the piece you’re trying to weed.

There are also a bunch of wonderful tools available (like these picks) that help to easily get all the extra vinyl out so you can get ironing.

After laying a few towels down on the counter, put your blank pillow case down and center the weeded gold foil vinyl on the case.

Turn on the Easy Press. This only takes about a minute! Very fast. The press comes with a chart that tells you what temperature you need to set it to for different kinds of iron-on. Foil iron-on needs to be transferred at 295 degrees. Once it’s heated up, it’ll sing you a song so you know it’s ready.

To use the Easy Press to transfer the vinyl, pick the easy press up out of its safety holder and place it over the vinyl. Press the “C” button on the right and the timer will count down for you. Put some pressure on the machine while it’s heating away, and once it beeps you’re ready to pick it up and move on to the next part of your vinyl.

The bottom of the Easy Press is 9x9in…our graphic is 12 in wide, so we had to do two pressings.

After you’ve done the front, don’t take the top plastic sheet off quite yet! Flip your project over and heat up the back as well. This will make sure that the foil vinyl is good and set.

You can CAREFULLY peel up the top sheet now.

And it’s done. I think the longest part of this project was weeding the vinyl!

acorn gold foil pillow

This pillow was kind of an after thought. I had the materials laying around, so thought I would give this idea a try!

The project is already set up in Cricut’s Design Space, CLICK HERE to go to it. After it’s up, click on “Make It” and follow the instructions.

You should end up with the pieces in this photo after you’re done weeding.

To add a little sparkle, we’re going to add some foil vinyl to the felt acorn and leaf. Use the Cricut Easy Press just like you did in the last pillow to get the foil on the felt.

As I said, this project was an after thought…my thread and stuffing seemed to have gone missing so I assembled this little pillow with my GLUE GUN. That’s right, this is a no-sew project!

You should have two whole pieces of felt to work with from the material list. I cut mine down to 9×10 before I started assembly. You’re going to run a bead of glue around three of the sides of the felt and lay the two pieces together to make a big pocket. I’d recommend doing one side at a time, though!

Turn the case inside out after the glue has a chance to cool off.

This part is slightly amusing. Since I was doing this project on a whim, I had to use what was on hand. Seems that I am clean out of stuffing at the moment right along with thread. One of those viral videos that makes its way around Facebook suggested using plastic bags as pillow stuffing for outdoor pillows. Since this one is really just for decoration, I said what the heck! Let’s do it! And that is why there are grocery bags in this pillow.

After you put whatever stuffing you see fit into your pouch, you’ve got to seal it up. The dark brown is our front, so I folded it over the orange just slightly and glued it down. Worked perfectly, and no sewing involved.

From there, you’ll just glue the acorn and leaf on the front and place it with the big thankful pillow where it can look pretty!

All in all, I really loved using the Cricut Easy Press. I’ve seen the full size heat presses, and they look a little scary to use and they take up a LOT of room. This one does the same job, but is portable/space saving and has a safety feel to it. I’m not too worried about burning a hand off when there’s such a nice little base for the machine when you’re not using it. It’s also got an auto-off feature that’s pretty handy when you walk away for too long–no burning down the house because you’re not paying attention!

Interested? You can buy yours here.

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Cricut. The opinions and text are all mine.