Three cheers for the Red, White, and Blue Redo!

This is my postaweek 2011 remnant redo project of the week, a couple of couch pillows on the cheap!

I bought these two upholstery-like woven pieces of American flag-themed cloth on ebay last year some time. The transaction no longer shows up so I can’t tell you how cheap I got them, but I believed I got a bargain! We have lots of red, white, and blue in the house, and we recently painted the living room “accent wall” turquoise (it was dark red prior to that.) So I found a length of turquoise cotton or cotton-linen blend to make backs for the pillows. The pillow forms came from JoAnn’s Clearance Rack, at a cost of $5 each.  And the pillow cover zippers came from my recent hunting and gathering trip to the Original Sewing and Quilt Expo, foraged from a bin at the Vogue Fabric booth at a cost of $.14 a piece.

Cut, sew zipper, sew seams, serge edges. I serged the edges because the flag fabric is very prone to unraveling. If you serge straight past the end of the seam, then start at the beginning of the perpendicular seam (rather than try to pivot when you get to the end to start on the next edge) your corners will be sharp.

And believe me, it didn’t take long to make these. Maybe an hour.

 

Cutting the backing to fit the flag panel

 

 

sewing on the zipper

 

 

Now Bob has something new to get cat hair on

 

 

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Georgia Americana

On the first leg of our road trip, we stopped at an antique mall just off the freeway in Lake Park, Georgia.  There must be some Gator fans up in that area, because the shop boasted a collection of old UF yearbooks, circa 1930’s to 1950’s.  Skip opened the 1938 yearbook and found the picture of his dad that we have on our desk. “Y’all do favor a lil bit,” observed the Antique Shop proprietor, as he and Skip stood staring down into the great big book (ironically called THE SEMINOLE in those years).

Skip found a 46-star American flag (ca 1908) for his collection and a couple of 48-star flags he thinks are early 1912 because they have different star patterns. He says the star patterns weren’t standardized until 1912.  

We ended up buying some cut glass honey muddlers.  I later discovered that one was listed on the receipt as a “hiney muddler,” so we got a few miles of laughs from that transaction. We got some tiny silver spoons to use with our salt cellars. This shop had a massive collection of salt cellars and spoons. I soon had the spoons arranged on the little platter by bowl shape and handle patterns. In conversation with the two proprietors, we told them that we use our salt cellars, rather than just collect them.

“Whut?” they said in unison, two pairs of round eyes flying open at us. “You mean y’all have formal dinner parties?”

“Yeah, people think we care about them when we put this stuff out!”

“Y’all KILLIN’ me!”