Around this time last year when we were away on holidays, I shared a little picture of the pet travel pillows I made especially for us to bring with us since we’re crazy cat people to our core and really miss little Juniper and Toshi while we’re away. I figured being able to smoosh our faces into poor replicas of them would stave off a small amount of home sickness whenever we’re away. And since we’ve brought them with us 3 times since, it actually works!
And here’s how I did it …
Last year when I made these travel pet pillows, I had taken photos of each step, but when I went through my external hard drive I couldn’t find a single picture. So apologies for the lack of tutorial photos. It’s a fairly straight forward project anyways, and I’ll try to explain as best as I can how I did it.
I first photographed Juniper and Toshi on their own, in good light, making sure they were facing me and being their cute selves. I opened each photo in Photoshop [or the Linux equivalent ‘Gimp’] and traced around them using the paint tool set to white. I carefully did this and coloured out the rest of the photo until the entire photo was white, with the exception for each fur baby.
I saved each image as a jpgon a USB key and went to one of those gift kiosks in a local shopping centre that specialises in printing images onto objects. They printed Juniper and Toshi onto a square pillow each. As these were going to be travel pillows and the smaller they are the better, I sewed the pillow closer to the silhouettes of each cat and filled them with extra stuffing I had. That’s it really!
We bring our travel pet pillows every time we’re away from home. Even during our Christmas holidays when we’re staying down the road with family for a few days, our pillowed kittens come with us too. As crazy as it sounds, it’s a little ritual we now have to take Juniper and Toshi out when we first get to our hotel and squeeze them a bit.
Husband even has a few sneaky photos of me passed out, face mask on with a kitten pillow under each arm for every holiday we’ve been on since I made them. And no, you won’t find those pictures hitting the internet any time soon. Sorry 😉
THIS IS SUCH A BRILLIANT PROJECT!!!!! I need to make a travel pillow of our puppy, Sudsie, so we can bring him everywhere 🙂 Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!!!
SUDSIE! Nope. I literally can't even. That is possibly the cutest name ever!
Awww, and no problem at all! I'm so glad my project could be of help to another fur-parent. Enjoy!
Oh my god this is one of the first projects of yours I saw that I decided that I LOVED YOU. It's amazing. And now I know how to make my own!! Whoop!! xxx
And just think Kimberly, you can make one of Pablo, Meisha and Quito! I think you're going to need a suitcase for potential pet pillows alone hahaha! xx