Couch Pillows

I ordered these pillows on Amazon back in January to go with our new couch. Mike and the boys all wanted a say in what I chose... I picked out the options but they had veto power. Sadly my Nordic floral folk pattern and the hipster patterned unicorn designs were vetoed. But we did all agree on these, so in the end it's probably for the best.

These are an indoor/outdoor burlap material that we have on another set of pillows and it seems to hold up well to the kids and dogs. And after the abuse my most recent pillows have gotten - I wanted something durable and cheap that also looked cute.

The set was very inexpensive (4 pillows for $18 at the time I ordered them) so I didn't think the metallic detail was really metallic ink... but in person, the effect was a little cheesy. If it had been a flat copper brown it would have been fine, but the fake metallic details were a cheesy gradient of peach to brown. It looks decent in photos but in person it was less than ideal.

So my solution was a $2 tube of metallic copper fabric craft paint. I washed the covers, slid a piece of cardboard inside and traced the fake metallic lines with real metallic paint.

In person the difference is awesome. In photographs its much harder to see... the metallic copper paint just looks brown in my pictures... but in real life it's PERFECT. Just the right amount of sparkle and sheen. No more cheesy peach gradient. On the left is the original stripe and on the right is the metallic paint mid-job.

I painted all 3 pillows that had the metallic detailing. Now it looks much better.  And I love the designs so this was a great way to fix a minor detail I didn't like ($2 + 1 hour of time). And now they are exactly what I wanted.

 You can see a little bit of the metallic detailing in the arrow below - it sparkles just enough.

And the style coordinates well with the existing pillow we've had forever in a similar geometric pattern. And I like the juxtaposition of modern pillows next to the busy traditional wallpaper and the busy traditional style rug. Our house has always been an eclectic mix of old and new, modern and traditional.

I realized after taking the pictures that one of the pillows in is in the wash with chocolate ice cream stains... but that's the beauty of 4 cases, we just rotate them! And the paint is holding up well so far to washing the past two months (which is fairly frequent since my kids are often sticky and Morgan loves to lay on pillows).