Pillow Talk

I’ve been obsessed with throw pillows lately, and since DIY-ing this sweater-turned-pillow cover earlier this month, I’ve been looking around for other great fabrics (either from a store or straight outta my closet) that would be good pillow material. First I threw together these additional softies for the living room sofa and chairs, both from old sweaters:

Then I turned my attention to my bed. It’s been looking so sad and dreary to me lately – and the weather hasn’t helped – so I wanted to add some pops of color to liven things up. Here’s the before:

And here’s the after:

So much better! We’re still strategizing on drapes for behind the bed, and maybe a headboard, but I’m thrilled with the way the pillows are starting to tie the room together. I used this painting (a gift from my hubby years ago) as a jumping off point and thought the purple and yellow tones would work well with the oatmeal color and more masculine texture of our coverlet:

I found the purple bolster by accident at Target while I was shopping for Halloween costume supplie, but the yellow accent proved much more challenging. The color needed to be just right – no mustard or Easter Egg yellow here – and I was hoping for something graphic to make the combo a little more modern. I loved these  lattice pillowcases from Nate Berkus’ HSN collection (and the sale price had me at hello) but they were out of stock. Then on an outing to Jo-anne Fabric earlier this week, I found these amazing Fabric Quarters:

They are pre-cut pieces of fabric, all $1.99 each, in a huge variety of colors and patterns. Not sure what they are intended for (maybe quilting?) but the size and price point was perfect for this project, and I fell in love with this bright lemon yellow botanical fabric. Up close you can clearly see the pattern, but from a distance it looks like a modern dot.

Oh, and despite my earlier claims about keeping pillows on the bed to a minimum, we may be approaching pillow-intervention territory now as the count reaches seven. Is there a support group out there for this disease?