Whatchagot Pillow Makeover

My internet is down, and before it went down it was so bad it was unusable. I haven't even been able to load this blog to read posts.  We were also without power for a day, but thankfully the power company is more diligent about repairs than the internet company seems to be.  Right now I am at a friend's house using her connection to catch up, so I thought I could do a quick post.

Last week I traveled to Cincinnati with my children and some friends for a ginormous homeschool convention.  It was a grueling three days of inspiring seminars and shopping the huge curriculum expo.  The convention was held at the Duke Energy Convention center in downtown Cincinnati.  It's a three-story building that takes up two city blocks... pretty amazing to our country-bumpkin selves.  One thing I loved was that there was art all over the building... murals and sculptures and mosaics... I really enjoyed looking at them as we hiked from one end of the building to the other repeatedly.  I am sorry to say, however, that I did not get photos of all the art, even though I kept intending to, because my hands were always full of children and stroller and bags and other necessaries.  So all I have to show you is the multicultural mosaic mural (ha, say that three times fast) that we walked by on the outside.

We are having a glorious spring, warm and lovely and everything blooming heavily.  It lasts for such a short time... I haven't actually taken many pictures of all that, either, I've just been outside enjoying it.  I found these gorgeous pink dogwoods at the zoo the other day.

When spring starts I always get an itch to refresh my surroundings.  I have been lazily reading and painting all winter, which seems a waste of time I could have been using to accomplish household things which trapped in the house, but I didn't have the drive.  Now I do, and reading and painting has fallen by the wayside while I work on household things.  I am hoping to get my kitchen repainted soon, but we'll see.  Yesterday it was chilly and rainy, so I made some new pillow covers for my couch.  I like to do this from time to time since it is an easy way to refresh the decor, but I haven't been able to get any fabric lately.  I went digging in my fabric stash and found things with which I could make-do.  A couple of these fabrics were remnants I got and have been saving because I knew they would get trashed as pillows.  But I haven't found any other use for those materials, and stashed in the closet is no way to enjoy them, so I decided to use them.  Let's try to keep them off the floors, shall we kids?

I also found some plain heavy material (probably came from a yard sale?) which I dressed up with a little stenciling.  I didn't have any fabric medium, so this is just acrylic paint.  It's a little stiff, but I'm sure it will be fine.

Here are the three pillows I finished:

These two are the two I had thought "too fine for work days."  I love the coarse weave of the solid one, and I hope it holds up well to daily use.

I love how the stenciled one turned out.

I still have one more pillow to cover.  I found some plain white fabric and tried printing on it with my Gelli plate.  I had fun figuring that out, and ended up with a pretty cool piece of material, but it is very stiff from that much paint and I think I would prefer to use fabric medium for this application.  Also, I got it done and realized that the color was not really what I was going for (it's brighter than you can see in the photo).  So, back to the drawing board, I'll figure out something else for that last pillow.