Pillows for everyone

One thing all the rooms in my house have is pillows. Lots of pillows. I feel that having a lot of pillows is necessary to live a peaceful and appropriately civilized existence. My bed currently tries to support seven pillows. So it’s no surprise that I wanted to make a number of pillows for the baby’s room. These are the first two, and I am quite fond of them.

One, as you can see, is just a simple orange pillow using one of my very favorite pieces of upholstery fabric. It’s also the seat cushion for my crafting chair, so I left it super simple. I also made an orange neck pillow, but didn’t take any pictures of it.

The tree pilllow is one of my decorative additions to the room, made according to the directions for the Scrap Buster Fall Pillow from Cluck Cluck Sew. I’ve wanted an excuse to make this pillow for quite some time, and the nature theme in the room finally gave me an excuse. I used scraps from the bibs, from my huge kitchen project of last year, and a couple of other random pieces. I’m not sure this is much of a “stash buster” since I didn’t honestly use up much fabric on the leaves, but it’s definitely pretty! I put on as many leaves as looked decent. I love it!

Aside from stash fabric, the pillow is backed with more of the orange fabric I used for the other pillow and the front is some soft brushed cotton duck that I seem to have a lot of, but have never used. I also used Heat ‘n Bond for the applique as per the directions (and of course I managed to iron some of the sticky stuff it onto my ironing board).

I really do love that orange fabric. It’s upholstery weight, it has a lovely weave, and I think I got a bolt-end of it at Hancock Fabrics for about $2. I’m a big fan of texture. But it’s the applique that’s actually more interesting here than my orange fabric.  It was very fiddly work, making all those leaves, but I think worth it. It was simple, just time-consuming.

Of course, now that you can see my leaves up close, you’ll note that my leaf sewing is wobbly. You see, I was watching Rowan Atkinson Live on Hulu, and I kept laughing, and then my sewing line would go wonky. Rowan Atkinson always makes me howl with laughter, so I can’t be held responsible for detail work when that’s going on.

These pillows featured not one, but two kinds of zippers, because I am practicing putting zippers into things. Zippers continue to make me nervous. I do not like them, although at this point I have successfully installed a couple dozen. I have been known to actively procrastinate projects that require zippers. But these didn’t turn out badly. The left one is a hidden zipper using House on Hill Road’s instructions. The right one is just a simple exposed zipper.

In other news, my plants are beginning to suspect that spring is here. They are only half right. The weather has been wavering between sixties and sunny, and forties and raining. I am waiting to see which of my plants will perk up and start looking healthy this year, and which need replacing. I tried to keep last year’s tomato plant alive all winter but alas … it appears to have croaked, and I think the sage did too. I’ve gotten a new violet and a spearmint plant so far this spring. I’m sure they won’t be the last, although I should probably not overdo the new plant acquisitions, what with the new baby coming.

Onto the next project!