Pillow Talk

As pretty as I think the benches are – they aren’t very comfortable for long-term lounging (anything over 5 minutes on chipboard is torture in my world).

So pillows are needed!

I was lucky because I had some extra foam from our overstuffed air mattress (the extra slab of foam actually made our bed convex and we were both rolling out during the night – removing the foam made all the difference).

I was able to cut the foam to fit both benches which did wonders for the seat comfort but I still wanted to have some throw cushions for leaning and laying down comfort.

I bought some pillow forms from an upholstery shop in Vegas (9 pillows for $38) and on a shopping trip to Home Fabrics in Lake Forest with two dear friends found the perfect fabric.

“Perfect” is defined as $3 a yard. We also found some almost perfect fabric ($7.99 a yard) in a faux burlap – softer than real burlap. We’d seen the same look at Pottery Barn recently so our choices were trendy and frugal.

Here are the fabric choices for each bench:

Bright blue denim and burlap for the outdoor turquoise bench

Navajo chenille and a bandana-esque cotton for the indoor pine bench.

The bandana pillows were quick and easy.

HOT TIP: My secret for using the machine to sew the final seam to encase the pillow form is to squish the pillow down and safety-pin the pillow case to keep the pillow back from the seam. Then you can sew it without pinning (I hate pinning). Release the safety-pin and fluff!

The burlap pillows were harder – because of the orange stencil print, I didn’t have enough fabric to ensure that the stencil could be centered on both sides. So I flipped the fabric and made the back side in the wrong side of the fabric.

That worked well…except that because of the need to cut my pillow fronts from the middle of the fabric – I didn’t have enough fabric remaining to actually make whole squares so I had to piece together the backs. That’s what I get for NOT measuring while I was purchasing the fabric – see what I mean about my haphazard methods? But at $7.99 a yard, I was trying to minimize anyway...so still may have made the decision to piece the backs.