January brought more pillow fun. I’ve been coveting this beautiful fabric for months, but didn’t have a project in mind so I kept leaving it at the store. Finally I decided to just buy it and as soon as I walked in the house I knew it would replace the now faded pillows on the couch. It’s a Chinese red and not at all in line with the orange I normally pick for the living room, but it was beautiful on the grey couch, so it was time for a change. Conveniently I still had a giant piece of grey felt for companion pillows.

I decided this fabric needed a special treatment so I stared at many, many beautiful pillow examples online and finally decided to try my hand at pin tucking. It looked fancy, but I quickly came to believe everyone who said how easy it was. I put a band of pin tucking on the print pillows and three widely spaced ones on the felt.

And thanks to this great tutorial, I even added zippers to all my pillows for the first time ever! (I can’t believe I’ve been adding buttons all this time thinking they were easier…)

I managed to stick to my comfort zone of only sewing straight lines and ended up with beautiful, fancy pillows – what a bonus! And I have to admit, I love this fabric even more and catch myself just looking at it every now and then and being happy it’s on my couch 🙂

I couldn’t let any of the fabric go to waste, so I borrowed from this example and used the last piece to make another pin tucked band to put on a grey felt pillow for the chair in the room.

And just because I was on a roll with my fancy new straight lines – I made this pillow reversible, here’s the back: