Wednesday, August 15, 2012

California State Pillows

I went to visit one of my best friend in L.A. over Memorial Day this year. We were sitting on her couch when she told me just how much she didn't like her pillows. I probably made some lame exclamation like "BOFFO" because I had been wanting to make couch pillows for a while. I told her I always invisioned making colorful pillows with animal silhouettes on them.  She then told me she was really into lime green and would love something to do with Cali on them.  Luckily, California is one of the few states (believe me, I looked at all 50) with a really cool flag.  At first, I was going to put a bear on one pillow and a star on the other but realized if they weren't proportional, it wouldn't be obvious that it was for CA.  I also realized that if they were proportional, the star would look hella lame on its own pillow.  So I decided to put both elements on both pillows, mirroring each other.

I was lucky to find a funky fabric for the silhouettes, I was nervous plain black wouldn't be interesting enough.  The pillows themselves were easy to do but the funky fabric was a bit harder to deal with than I had initially anticipated.  It is woven, so fraying was a big problem. I ended up sewing two pieces together for each element and cutting the fray around the stitch. That worked pretty well but didn't solve the problem completely.  I went ahead and sewed all the parts onto the pillow and used fine scissors to cut the extra bits off and then a lint roller to keep them looking clean.  The end result was fantastic.

I finished these with just enough time to send them to her and they arrived th day before her birthday.  Look out for more pillows from me!