Our Apartment Redecoration Project Part II: Pillows

The new couches that sparked our apartment redecoration project also came with four feather pillows. They were rather squashed and sad when we received them, but I decided to give them a fluffing and make new covers for them to accent our newly decorated room. (After all, feather pillows are quite nice and there was no sense in discarding them.)

It was a challenge to find fabric that would match the colors of our room, was a design we both liked, and was not $40/yard. At the very last store I went to I found three fat quarters with this fairytale tree design for about $1.50 each.

I scoured the store looking for more but to no avail. What to do with four pillows and only three pieces of fabric? Also, the fat quarters weren’t quite big enough to cover the entire front of the pillows…

Luckily, I had an off-white cotton in the stash that perfectly matched the background of the fat quarters. I used it to make the backs of the pillows, including the bit that wraps around to the front and makes those bars top and bottom. For the fourth pillow, I made a cover entirely out of the solid fabric. It lives on our red circle chair, where it is a nice contrast. And the off-white looks fine with the white couches, since there are other off-white things in the room, like the walls, which are large! And really, our two seater couch would have been overwhelmed with two patterned pillows anyway. These 22″ pillows are not small! It worked out perfectly!

I followed this tutorial to make my pillow covers, adjusting for the extra seams I needed to add to use my fat quarters. I also flat lined all the pillow covers with muslin to help keep the feathers from poking through, to provide opacity, and to help disguise the seam allowance from the fat quarter seams. I love that this style cover does not require closures and is easy to remove if necessary. We love that the pillows give an interesting spark to the room, jazzing up our couches a bit with their non-solid fabric.