While in
San Francisco, I inherited a stack of handkerchiefs and doilies that once belonged to my grandmother and great grandmother. Rumor has it that some of the doilies may have been handmade by my great grandmother.
I don't really put out doilies on tables, so I tried to figure out a way to incorporate these vintage things into our home. I thought I'd start out simple by making a muslin pillow for our new couch. Many moons ago, when I thought I was going to transition into being a portrait photographer, I bought about a thousand yards of cheap unbleached muslin fabric with the plan to paint/dye some photo backdrops. The fabric sat in a bin for ages, I moved to the west coast, and my photo goals entirely shifted. But my giant roll of muslin still remained. So I decided to start cutting it up into chunks and dyeing segments to add to my fabric collection. I had a little hand-dyeing festival in my kitchen last Sunday, and ended up with an array of pretty soft colors.
I also threw one of the old yellowed doilies into the gray dye bath, thinking it might work for the top of a pillow.
I love the variation in colors. I used standard grocery store
Rit dye and followed the package instructions for dyeing in the sink or a bucket. I wanted softer colors, so I never let the fabric sit for longer than 10 minutes. Some strips of fabric were in for 5 min for a lighter wash, some were in for 10 minutes for a richer color. The gray was my favorite because some of the pieces have a lavender-like tone to them. The colors got even softer after I gave them a thorough rinse and final wash in the washing machine.
And so, I made a pillow.
Sewing the perimeter of the doily to the fabric was incredibly tedious but necessary.
While I was digging through fabic, I found an old feed sack that I bought at an antique store in middle-of-nowhere Wisconsin right before I left in 2008. I decided that it needed to become a pillow as well.
I didn't use a pillow form on this one, so it's lumpy bumpy and stuffed with fluff. And I like it.
And so does dog.
And a thought on pillows: I used to read a blog that answered a lot of reader mail on how to do home-decor type stuff on your own. They did an entire post on the "science" of selecting and arranging throw pillows, and that was the turning point where I stopped subscribing and could no longer read that blog. Throw pillows are not scientific. There is no magic formula. I don't care if you have two on one end and one on the other, or four all lined up in a row, or one stripedy one and one solid. People got all worked up and were all like, "OMG this is so hard! I've been doing it wrong all these years! Gaaahhh!" and "I'm afraid to use a circular pillow! Maybe it should be oval instead? Waaaah!" Oh man. The insecurities. The scorn. The pillow drama. Honestly, who the hell cares? DO WHATEVER YOU WANT. The end.
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