Pillows and Feathers

I suppose you could say ours is a fairly neutral interior except for the Persian carpets and some of the wall art. The carpets are one thing I will not change out because of where my husband is from. It’s just a part of our overall decorating theme. So the rest of the furniture and accessories have to be fairly quiet to tone down the more colorful rugs. The last couple of weeks we have been rearranging pillows. I hate the pillows that are made to match the Ethan Allen sofa. What makes it worse is when the feathers keep sticking you and they end up all over the place. So we decided to unzip those covers and get rid of all the loose irritating feathers, cover the inside pillow with another layer of pillow covers we no longer like, and put the original cover back on top of that. You would have thought we killed two chickens or geese with the bag we filled of feathers. In the mean time there are a couple of very old Restoration Hardware pillows that I love, but the outside covers are beginning to show their wear. So we switched a couple of those out and they are really neutral and to my husband’s liking. It seems every time we “go bold” with prints vs. neutrals we are sorry we did. We still have the original Ethan Allen pillow we picked out so long ago when we lived in the Midwest. It was to become the beginning of a long and lasting relationship with our favorite designer who ended up helping us redo the whole house. I learned a few things from Glenn, but could never live up to his standards. When he put prints together, they looked so much better than ours. 

The Story of My Life in Pillows

We wanted to freshen up the living room space with a couple of pillows. I dislike the pillows that originally came with the couch and usually try to find another home for them. After searching last year and not finding anything I liked, I tried again a couple of weeks ago. No one seems to make 18x18 pillows anymore. Everything is huge. We didn’t need the fillers either which makes it even more difficult. So I did find an interesting pattern on Houzz that goes well with the tribal ethnic persian carpet. And wouldn’t you know they come from Fall River, Massachusetts - where a lot of family is from. The city is famous for its textile mills. It was funny to see the tracking label for the pillows - from Massachusetts to Virginia because it’s exactly the same path I started on so many years ago and ended up in now. The pillows arrived and as with my Persian wall art, I shuffled things around until I got it right - but I’ll probably change my mind again. The new pillows did end up in the living room. One went on the chair and the other one on the couch. The RH striped pillow from the chair ended up in the den. One of the matching couch pillows ended up in the den and another one on the living room chair. The original Ethan Allen pillow from the Midwest moved to the bedroom from the den. And the two solid dark red pillows ended up in storage. I never liked those anyway. Eventually I would love to get a larger couch or sectional that would fits the now larger living space rather than the current loveseat we had on Capitol Hill. And the old DWR recliner could use a recover. So for now the pillows add a punch of something. And that’s good enough for now.