My first Bench pillow!

I promised a picture of my new kitchen bench.  I finished painting it last week just in time for company.  It took 1 coat of primer, 3 coats of white latex paint, and 3 coats of Poly-crylic.  The finish  turned out perfectly...not sticky, like some other furniture I've painted.  Anyway, here it is in all it's glory.  I moved the table out of the way for viewing purposes.

 And last night I finished making a pillow for it.  I'm not sure if I'm going to put a cushion on it  to sit on, but I know it needs pillows so I'm starting with those.  Here is my first one!  I'm going to make big flowers inspired by the fabric in the valences above.  The side pillows are ones I bought at Ross as pillow forms for the future pillows... they happen to look great with it.  I decided it is way cheaper to buy decorator pillows to use as pillow forms than getting ones from the fabric store ( 20x20 pillow form at Joann cost 17.99 or 11.40 with a coupon, 20X20 pillow set of 2 cost 15.99 at Ross)

This flower was inspired by this flower in the fabric.

Similar right?

 Want to see how I made these petals?

 I sewed a strip of 2" red fabric to a strip of 2 1/2 in teal fabric...

then folded it half and ran a gathering stitch on the bottom edge.

 Then I cut it into 7 inch pieces and gathered them up and pinned them like so around a 12 in circle drawn on my pillow fabric.

Then I watched it grow...when I got closer to the center I cut the length to 6 inches for smaller petals.

 And there you have it...

The finished dimensions of the pillow are 20" x 20".  The petals took about 1 yard of fabric all together.

I'm linking this up to the Blogger's Pillow Party over at Stitched in Color.  If you are in need of some pillow inspiration check it out.

Oh, one more thing...I'm super excited because Doug just ordered us a DSLR...  I can't wait to be taking better pictures... Yahoo!!.

Revisiting Bench Pillows

Things have been quiet around here lately.  I have been busy playing nurse to sick kids and one with a broken toe that required surgery.  Things are slowly returning to normal and so I'm back to blogging.

Remember this pillow?? It was the first pillow I made for my new kitchen bench.  Sadly, it was almost a year ago that I made it with high hopes of making 3 more flower pillows to accompany it.

Last week I made two more, sans flowers.  

 I have been wrestling with myself as to just what to make for the rest of them for too long.  I thought I had better just crank some out before I get tired of the valences I was trying to match.

I think they go nicely together.  Meredith thinks the light blue Chevron needs a flower.  I'm not sure yet. What do you think?  What should I do for my last one?  Something with red on it? Brown? Another flower? Maybe I actually need 2 more pillows...

I also painted my kitchen walls a light gray color.  It's was probably the real motivation behind finishing the pillows.  I do have a hard time finishing a project.

Any suggestions???