I am finishing a pair of pillow covers, and think they're going to be
very nice! A pair of pillows came with my new sofa, and they are a
great size and very comfortable. However, they are really ugly and
not washable, so I measured them carefully, got out the wonderful
stack of stencils I have tucked away, and designed covers. Each side
of each pillow will have white fabric stitched with a brightly colored
thread in an ornate whole-cloth style pattern. The patterns are all
different, of course, as are the thread colors. I am using bias
binding tape to edge each piece, and will stitch together three sides
and add a matching zipper to the fourth side. One pillow will have
burnt red edging, and the other hunter green since I had that bias
tape on hand and even had matching zippers -- I suspect that stuff
came from my late mother's miscellaneous sewing stuff. Anyhow, the
sofa will certainly look nicer with those ugly pillows covered! I do
a fair amount of whole-cloth quilting using colored threads, and
always make a pillow cover to test out thread colors, since some look
great and others pretty miserable and a sample is really the only way
to know for sure. And I have found it uses up some of the fairly
unattractive cotton fabrics to use them for the inside of pillow
covers. By next week the sofa will look pretty good!