Nearly a pillow.

The ikat pillow has now been sewn up and is technically a usable pillow. The front is all in the ikat stripe pattern, with two different patterns on the back. The backs overlap with vintage mother of pearl buttons closing the envelope.




I find that this envelope style is easy to put on and take off, and looks good flat, but often pulls open and gaps when a pillow form is stuffed into it. So I like to use several buttons to keep the flap more neatly closed - 3 buttons minimum; preferably five. I've got oodles of these buttons so I might as well use them with abandon.




The pillow isn't quite done yet. I like having some sort of welt or cording around the edges of the pillow, somewhat like a frame around a picture. I've used I-cord in the past, either in a plain colour or striped, but since this pillow has a very strong striped pattern to it already I didn't want horizontally striped cording around the edges; it just seemed too potentially discordant with all those stripes that didn't line up.


So I'm knitting a long stripe of bias knitting in stripes which once it's sewn around a cord and attached to a pillow the stripes will be on an angle instead of horizontal. I've got the bias strip a little over halfway done; it's the last thing to be knitted for this project. Once it's sewn in place the pillow will be done. Oh, yeah. I still need to make the pillow form to go inside. A flat pillow isn't much of a pillow, after all. Ok, so it'll be almost done!