Absurdities: The Pillow Edition

For my upcoming class at the North House Folk School, I made a pillow using cool fabric pompoms, as illustrated in Väv Magazine, #2, 2013. I love the look.

The pillow is made from beautiful remnant wool from the Faribault Woolen Mill.  I added a tiny piece of sheepskin from my stash, the softest gray fleece ever, purchased on a fabulous trip to Norway with my husband in 2016, at a shop somewhere between Stavanger and Bergen.  The small piece was all I could manage to fit in my suitcase, though I ached to walk away from the mounds of beautiful pelts.

I used silk pieces for the tassels.  The instructions called for using small bits of leftover yarn for stuffing the balls, but I used polyester batting. Basically, you baste a circle, pull it tight, and stuff it.

My husband looked startled at the finished product.  Not in a mean way, he said, “It looks absurd! It looks like it has a hernia or something, and the wool is bursting out of the top.”  Indeed. I really dislike limp, not-stuffed-enough, pillows, so in my zeal to fill it up, I made the cover a bit tight for the 15″ pillow insert.  It does look like it is ready to explode.  On the other hand, the tassels look great, and the fleece–even though my husband said it looks like a dustmop–is amazingly soft.

Here’s the back.

I plan to make a bit smaller pillow insert for it, later.  For now, I will concentrate on writing the documentation for my class, based on the general information in the Väv article and my own experience.