Finally.
I'm not sure what finally got up my ass to spur these pillows into action, amid all the other incompletes laying dormant around the house. I finished the Sashiko-inspired embroidery shortly after we moved into the house. They've been innocuous enough, needlework tied-off, hanging from the boards, looking pretty and serene.
But even before those curtains were done (hell, I'm still hunting for proper cleats which aren't to be found at Home Depot as had been promised) I was looking to those linen panels to fill up some crafty evenings. And so I backed them with my herringbone wool remnant find, outfitted them with zippers, and finished the pair with some of the miles of binding tape I'd made up for Bear's quilt last year. If I'd gone with what I thought would be most visually pleasing, I might have picked out a nice steely gray to adorn those edges. But, you know, use what you have and all.
Back to those zippers, though. My best ever thrift shop score was a bagful of zippers in all the hottest flavors of seasons long past and smelling like the floor of some ancient sewing basket. It was a haul so great I compare all subsequent thrift store visits against that great day. Dozens of zippers, invisible, metal coil and nylon, wide unwieldy coat zippers, ones long enough to seal up a sleeping bag, little ones for a future coin purse, their average age besting mine by at least a decade. All for 4 bucks. Their original packages list prices lower than what I routinely hand over to The Boy for a gumball out of the machine after soccer class. Added to my modest accumulation of zippers bought and miserly reclaimed (read: ripped off of no longer used items), and never again will I write off late-night project ideas for lack of hardware.
Another thing about these pillows… When the size of the panels is dictated by a sheet of stabilizer small enough to run through your printer to serve as an embroidery template, your end result will perhaps not conform to any known pillow form. No worries, though, because I've got that big bag of sewing scraps (I really should consider throwing things out occasionally) sitting by the sewing machine. I cut up a big pile of scraps into fabric confetti and stuffed them silly into makeshift cases of layered muslin and quilt batting. And, again, because the template was essentially a letter-sized sheet of fabric, these are teeny little pillows. Comically tiny, albeit highly decorative, throw pillows. Unless you're a toddler looking to accessorize her scaled-down replica of the chair you used to nurse her in. In which case, they're the perfect size.
