Use It Up, Wear It Out, Make It Do, Or Do Without!

When Kev and I got married, we were the recipients of a very pink, totally free couch. Although I’m not really a fan of pink (red has been my favorite color since I was four or five and I’ve always thought of pink as just a weak, watered down version of red), I was not one to turn down free furniture since we had none and very gratefully accepted the couch. It was one of those couches that came with about sixteen hundred throw pillows, so we took those to. And a random fake flower arrangement that the original owner got because it matched the couch nicely. In my opinion it was not the cutest couch ever, but you really can’t beat free when decorating your new apartment in the style of Early American Poverty.

(Just ignore the cute kids in the picture and take in the full glory of the couch. There was no blogging then so it never occurred to me to take a picture of just the couch.)

The couch served us well for a number of years, but when it finally got to the point where we were sitting on the floor at the same time that we were sitting on the couch, we used our tax return to buy a new one and sent the pink couch away. We did, however, keep a few of the throw pillows since anyone with six siblings knows there are never enough pillows to go around when everyone is lounging on the floor in front of the t.v.


A few weeks ago I noticed that the zipper on one of the those glorious pink pillows was broken and my thought process went something like this: “I need to fix that zipper . . . wait, no I don’t. I can just make new pillow covers!”

Now on a completely different topic, a few weeks ago Kev and I got serious about organizing the stuff in our basement. We’ve been here nearly a year and are just now getting around to it which may make us slackers, but I’m actually pretty proud of us since basements are often viewed as the final resting place of the detritus of life. This is the first time in our married lives that we have had all of our stuff in one place. We have always had a regularly rotating portion with us, but the vast majority was in storage at my parents’ house or my in-laws’ house. We had no idea how much stuff we had actually accumulated until we got it all here, looked at the enormous pile of boxes, and realized we had some serious dejunking to do. In the process of sorting things to the garbage, the DI and into labeled boxes so we have half a chance of finding it again when we need it, I discovered that I have ten boxes of fabric. And that’s after I consolidated. I've never really thought of myself as someone who has a fabric stash, but apparently I do.

Now back to the pillow covers. With the discovery of all that fabric in the basement came the realization that I really need to use some of it so I decided to make pillow covers out of fabric I already had. Since I didn’t have enough of any one fabric to make all the covers, I opted to do patchwork. My options were limited by how much I had of any one fabric so some of the things I chose were different than they would have been if I were shopping, but overall I’m fairly pleased with how they turned out. And I even picked the zippers out of the old pillow covers so I wouldn’t have to buy new ones. So one week and zero dollars later, here are my penny pinching pillow covers:


Now I just have to work up enough courage to attempt a slipcover for the chair. (And no, I won’t be doing that one in patchwork.)