I made pillows!!

I don't consider myself a very crafty person.  I blame the good-at-accounting part of my brain, it likes order too much to be creative.  However, I've been trying harder lately.  I think our house needed some small changes in the decor.

I made two sets of pillows, the first for Luke's room.  These were the easy ones.  I liked these napkins at Target and decided they would be good pillow colors so I bought 2 packs.

They just needed washed, ironed, stuffed, and finished up.  Washing and ironing is pretty straight forward.  I did the sewing at my sister's (since she has a machine, and I don't, and she's nice about sharing) and got some help from my 3 y.o. nephew and 2 y.o. niece.  They found it hilarious to push the pedal down all the way and then watch me laugh/panic at how fast it was going.  But we got them sewed.  It didn't take too long to stuff and then finish up the sewing (I did it all in one night).

And then we had nice blue pillows for Luke's new grey chairs.  Yay!  I do think pretty much anything is better in blue.  And these are comfortable.  It makes the chairs extra cozy and I know Matt agrees since we both have taken a fair amount of naps in those chairs when putting Luke to sleep.

The second set was a little more difficult.  I knew I wanted pink pillows for the couches but it took me months of looking to find a fabric I actually liked and that matched what I had pictured in my head.  I finally found fabric at JoAnns and then had to cut them.  That wasn't too bad.  Once again I borrowed my sister's machine and her kids for more hilarious help.

I had read something somewhere (probably Pinterest) that suggested using old bed pillow feathers for pillow stuffing.  We had old pillows that weren't being used so I thought this sounded like a nice recycling project.  It certainly wasn't my best idea.  At all.  Turned out cutting feather pillows makes a huge mess.

This probably should have been more obvious.  The above is only a fraction of the mess.  And of the problem.  I tore apart 2 feather pillows to stuff 2 couch pillows (after that Matt said no more).  We had feathers all over the house for days, despite my best efforts to clean them up.  Then there was the next problem of feather constantly poking out (and poking people) and feathers still all over.  I would not recommend this.  I will eventually tear the pillows apart and put stuffing in them but I think I can wait a year or something, we'll see how fast the feathers come out.

BUT....despite the initial and ongoing mess, I do like how they turned out.  The pink matches various other decor in the room and add some nice color to our dark couches. 

Those are my two sewing adventures of the last...18 years?  (I made some pretty awesome clothes my first few years in 4-H and thanks to my basement project I could even pull out the scorecards and ribbons.)