Pub­lished 1/13/2014

Recent­ly,  I fin­ished these col­or­ful dec­o­ra­tive pil­lows for a friend.

The fab­rics I used were an embroi­dered polyester/cotton for the body and brown vel­veteen fab­ric for the out­er piping.

Once I began cut­ting and sewing, I  was on a roll and thought I’d start and fin­ish the pil­lows in one night (maybe 2). But after fin­ish­ing one the pil­low cov­ers the first night & stuff­ing them with the down pil­low inserts, I real­ized I made a mis­take! Urghhhh.….…

Like every project, I learn some­thing new!

When I start­ed this project, I was giv­en the 2 down pil­low fillers (with no pil­low cov­ers). With­out putting much thought into it, I assumed this pil­low would be easy to pat­tern-  just mea­sure the edges of the filler pil­lows (I think it was 24“x24”) and sew a cou­ple squares togeth­er with pip­ing and invis­i­ble zip­pers. (I fig­ured I could make them the same way as the brown vel­veteen pil­lows here.)

Well, the first pil­lows did­n’t turnout very nice with that sim­ple square pattern!

The down pil­low fillers were so dense and full in the cen­ter that my first square pil­low cor­ners looked awk­ward with the square cor­ners. The cor­ners looked like flop­py dog ears point­ing out from each cor­ner! I even tried push­ing the filling/feathers to the cor­ners, but that did­n’t work.

Sad­ly, I had to tedious­ly seam rip out each zip­per, edge, and most of the piping.

The sec­ond time around, I round­ed out each cor­ner AND added some extra bat­ting to the corners.

After fin­ish­ing the project, I told some­one about my prob­lem and they informed me that many of the pil­lows online and in stores look like my first pil­low. I did­n’t believe them at first, but then after surf­ing the net I real­ized they were right! Here is an exam­ple. Even if this is the case, I like the cor­ners the sec­ond time around better 🙂