I'm learning a lot of things about myself and sewing in general..

If you don't want to paint the room, and you can't buy new furniture as often as your fickle design tastes require, the next best thing to freshen up the situation is to add new pillows in your living room.

Amongst the barrage of house decor catalogues that come to the house, there is always a nice amount of glorious pillows to choose from. The problem for me is that the ones I like always seem to cost a lot of money. Since I never want to pay for glorious pillows, I am stuck shopping in the clearance aisle and seldom get what I really want...

I made the commitment to some new decorative fabric and my sewing machine for a couple of hours..and I am so glad I did. I switched out two of those green pillows and three of the embroidered pillows...all had seen better days. In order to make the switch, I purchased about $50 worth of zippers and fabric... That's $10/pillow. Not bad, eh?

I recycled the pillow forms from the old pillows.... but even so, I priced sale pillow forms and they were about $10-15/each..so I think I would still have come in under what I paid for these pillows on clearance..

Soo what have I learned? Let me tell you something...

I've learned that all sewing tutorials (much like online mixed media workshops, I guess) are not created equally. It takes a little time to weed through the bad photos (life is too short for bad photos...make it right) and bad explanations to find someone who is speaking your language. I used this tutorial here, and modified it to add my embroidery and pom pom fringe. I really only need to read through a tutorial for the zipper at this point...still tricky for my brain to speak zipper sometimes.

I've also learned that even though I can make a lot of stuff, I need to sit, and MEASURE and calculate the supply cost of making said object rather than jumping right in. These pillows made sense financially..

Finally, I've learned that things may take a little longer than I estimate...but it's worth it in the end.

Don't the blue pillows look better? I think the embroidery is chic... :)

Pillow Snob.