Working on Pillows

I've been busy working on making pillows or pillow covers to put in my Etsy shop.  Not as easy as it sounds!  I've made pillows before, but have never been really satisfied with the way they turned out.  So I've really been studying how to do this professionally. I have a few books on the subject, and I've saved magazine articles and clippings for years, but couldn't quite work out some of the problems. YouTube has been a life-saver -- I've found several amazing tutorials for free!  Even Craftsy and Instructables have free tutorials.

So while I don't have any photos of the current projects yet, here's a pillow I made for a friend with an amazing batik she found in Mexico.

The form is 18 or 20". I had the batik for ages, but didn't get it made -- I knew I had just the right fabric to go with it, but it took forever to find it!  It's a natural color raw silk suiting from a skirt I made long ago. It might be tussah. I believe I lined it with muslin to make it sturdy.  The back has an envelope closing, with 2 large tortoiseshell buttons; it actually closes with very large snaps as I do not love buttonholes.

Hand-dyed Silk

Wanted to share some pictures of some of the hand-dyed silks I've done.  These are all lengths of white kimono silk I dyed using various shibori techniques, mostly with acid dyes from Dharma. As they're all just odd lengths, I'm not sure what to do with them, maybe make pieced scarves.