Accent pillows are the perfect accessory for any piece of furniture you own. They provide pops of color, texture, and luxury on a small budget. Accent pillows can add pattern and comfort in an instant and they can be switched out easily if you want to change your home decor seasonally. Adding the right accent pillow to a sofa or chair or replacing the cover of an existing pillow can be a relatively inexpensive makeover for an entire room.
My story today is about a pillow that was made from leftover fabrics. A few months ago, we reupholstered a wing chair for our customer. The new fabric transformed the chair with a modern look. The customer fell in love with the fabric and decided she wanted an accent pillow for her sofa. Unfortunately, the fabric was discontinued and all we had were miscellaneous pieces remaining from the reupholstery project. We always do our best to keep all customers happy, so we used the remnants to create the pillow cover.
The pillow turned out really cute and you can’t even tell there are three seams on it, can you?
Of course we could have picked another fabric, but the bottom line is the customer was so happy to have this little pillow in her favorite fabric and it is just a perfect addition to her sofa.
My client has the coordinating armoire in the living room and we wanted to take the piece from antique to modern.
Wanting to play up the contrast between antique and modern, we juxtaposed the gilded antique wood frame with a very modern red patterned cut velvet. It now looks perfect mixed with all of the modern artwork. Helping clients express their personality through fabrics, color and upholstery is our specialty. I love how this antique piece is now beautifully suited for a more modern setting. The settee is a treasure which stands as a work of art all on it’s own. That’s the power of reupholstery and good design.
Twice a year the Zero Landfill event provides an opportunity to keep interior design samples out of the landfill, plus it helps us get a jump on Spring and Fall cleaning. Throughout the year we save up discontinued fabric, sample books, carpet samples and miscellaneous remnants. Being overachievers, we did more than our fair share by filling up our entire Willow delivery truck and transporting these items to the drop off location. This season it was hosted by Organic Looms at 401 N. Wells in Chicago. We were grateful for their help with this event.
These interior design items, mostly sample books and memo samples, are then rescued from ending up in landfills. The goods are transferred to a warehouse where the public can sift through all the “treasures” and take whatever is useful to them. The zero landfill group also donates samples to be used as art supplies. The next few events will be assisted by United Supply in Roselle, IL. They’ve generously offered to collect items from WCAA members (Window Covering Association of America) twice a year. We are grateful for their volunteer efforts.
My 88 year old client Arthur Pollakoff just left my shop (Willow). We had a lovely conversation. (I should be doing my paperwork but I wanted to take a break and write down what he said first). He wanted to get a quote on some kitchen chair reupholstery. I walked to his car and brought the chair in. I quoted the price and he said he wanted to run it by his wife and see what she thought. I suggested he call her since just getting out of the car seemed to be quite a bit of work. He’s been married 62 years. When he was done speaking with her I told him he won a gold star for being such a good husband. He called her babe, honey and sweetheart. You could just tell he still really liked her. He wanted to reupholster the chairs but she wanted to shop for new chairs. He can barely walk 20 feet and knows shopping at stores for new chairs is completely ridiculous but he said, “ok, we will undertake the effort to look for new chairs, and reupholstery can be the fall back plan.”
He wasn’t just blankly doing what she wanted (as I see many husbands in my shop do), there was a sense of teamwork and mutual respect. They were disagreeing with one another but it was still very pleasant to listen to their phone conversation. He said to me, “One of the secrets to a happy marriage is that you have to respect each other.” I told him that I was divorced but that my 2nd marriage was wonderful. He told me more, “It’s important to remember that you don’t have to win every battle. That’s the one most people goof up.” He told me about his wife and he had endless nice things to say about her. She was an artist, and a professional calligrapher. From the calligraphy she started selling wedding invitations and from that became a wedding planner 40 years ago. She was very talented at it and he said he decided to support her efforts in it. He said, “It’s important to spend time together and I decided if I wanted to see my wife the best way would be to put on a tuxedo and work with her. He worked full time Mon-Fri as a salesman for a lighting company. And every Sat and Sun he was at a wedding in a tuxedo with her. He also joked that she was too beautiful to be left alone every Sat night at somebody else’s wedding anyway. He said working 7 days a week was hard work but that most “work” was hard. He said that good things and good luck would always happen when he was working hard. Never any other way. He joked that good luck could only engage when hard work was at hand. I agreed with that philosophy as most of the truly lucky things that had happened to me were when I was working hard.