Fabric: The patchwork pillows used cotton scraps raided from carrollb‘s stash. The bigger pillows used a heavyweight cotton bought at Yuzawaya.

Pattern: Winged it, with an assist from The Sewing Bible

My success at piecing inspired me to start (and complete) a project that has been on my to-do list for well over a year: make new cushion covers for the living room.

You guys have seen my futon in the background of many photos on this blog. It has this not-very-attractive, slightly Christmas-meets-faux-Southwestern pattern on it. It clashed with my husband’s not-quite-as-ugly but extremely dilapidated couch that he literally found on the street during his poor grad student days. When we moved in together and did the ritual Merging of the Furniture, we bought matching covers for both to hide the ugly and bring a semblance of coordination into our living room. You see the new futon cover in the background above.

But there were no matching covers for the cushions. So we still had this fun pop of Christmas-meets-faux-Southwestern in the living room that still did not remotely coordinate with my papasan.

“I’ll just make some new cushion covers,” I told my husband. Last March. Six months later, we went to Japan and I bought fabric. “For the cushion covers,” I told my husband.

Seven months later, I actually started.

I did the patchwork for the smaller pillows first, since I was now relatively confident I wouldn’t screw that up horribly.

It became clear (somewhat literally) at this point that I would need some kind of interfacing to keep the ugly cushion pattern from showing through the lightweight cotton. I found some lightweight black fusible interfacing at Joann’s, ironed it on without incident, and then cut out the pieces for the bigger cushions. I was still afraid of installing zippers, see, and planned to put that part off as long as possible.

And this is when The Sewing Bible led me to the light.

Continue reading Pillow-y Goodness (367 words) »

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