Welcome To My Pillow Factory

Like so many of the kids who attend our Sewing School camp at GSL, I love to make pillows. They're easy to whip up, they totally change the decor, and they're a great way to showcase favorite fabrics or seasonal decor. And, as the kids like to say, they're so fun to hug!

Although nowadays, I prefer to make removable pillowcases, a lot of the older pillow I have around the house are covered in layers and layers of fabric. Maybe someday some outer space archeologists are gonna land on my street and excavate my belongings -- if that scenario ever happens, they're gonna hit pay dirt with the pillows. Like the rings of a tree, the fabric choices both document and inform different stages of my life. There are the cowboy prints and 1950s barkcloth that I gravitated to in my mid-20s, the bird prints and Japanese kitsch that I loved in my 30s...



These days, I'm obsessed with ticking. I bought some bona fide heavy-duty ticking fabric at Hancock's a few months ago, and covered every bed pillow in the house in it. Most of the pillows were covered in the traditional way, but then, inspired by the decorative selvedge details on the West Elm quilt shown below, I decided to make a pillow with the selvedge on the outside. Cassius, in the picture at top, thinks it turned out great! Don't let his sweet face fool you -- he's a pillow-destroyer, as evidenced by the mountains of geese feathers I've been picking up in the backyard after he decided to rip apart a down pillow. Fortunately for both of us, he carefully removed the pillowcase first.


And lucky for me, there's a West Elm outlet just a few miles from my house, along with Pottery Barn and Williams-Sonoma outlets too. I scored this twin-sized quilt -- which serves as a summer-time coverlet for my denim chaise lounge (seen above, in the far left corner of my living room), for under $20. Last week, my mama was in town, and we went back and bought a king-size ticking quilt for under $40. Gotta love the silkscreened keys!