reclining in style (or impersonating a chicken)

As well as pottering about in the garden, I’m usually on a bit of a mission to sort out something in the house too. This is a never ending mission, since there’s always something in the house that needs sorting out, and what I do just depends on what gets my attention at the time, rather than what is most important.

One of my ongoing missions is to ‘sort out the bedroom’ – a mission that has already taken several years, and will probably never finish. Not because I have grand plans involving builders and redecorating every year, but because I have very limited enthusiasm for DIY, and can usually think of something better to do.

Anyway, that up there is the bed, tucked away under a huge skylight right at the top of the house. It’s on a mezzanine floor with steps up to it after Peter knocked the floor out several years ago (deliberately!) Fortunately they’re pretty sturdy steps, and well attached to the wall, although they do occasionally feel slightly precarious after a gin or two.

So the bed is perched on its own little platform, handy for stargazing, not very handy for photographing, and makes changing the sheets like some kind of athletic party game.

Various modifications have been made up here over the years, apart from the initial creation of the platform itself and the skylight. I made that rather jolly stripey curtain for the cupboard (a fancy word, cupboard, neatly disguising the fact that it’s actually just a boarded off part of the old chimney). We made and covered a headboard, and added a few fairy lights.

For a while now I’ve been meaning to get round to a few more mundane tasks though, and all this preamble has been a very long way of saying I refluffed the pillows.

This is what I started with, a rather flat and pathetic looking affair. The cotton covering was ludicrously shredded and falling off, and every time I changed the pillowcases I told myself I *must* do something about it, but since changing the sheets is such a palaver in itself, I generally put it off. Then the bed and the sofa simultaneously started filling up with feathers from two disintegrating feather cushions and I knew I had to pull my finger out and do something about it.

For the non-feathery pillow, I made a new casing out of an old cotton sheet (in much better condition than the pillow itself!), and set about pulling the stuffing apart into a giant fluffy pile.

It was quite fun actually, although it did take rather a long time. I ended up incorporating the stuffing from half of another old flat pillow with this one, making a lovely big fluffed up new one.

The feathery ones were just a ludicrous fiasco. The casing was so worn out, and the feathers so tiny, and I ended up looking like someone trying (badly) to impersonate a chicken. I’d made a new casing for the sofa cushion, and another for the pillow (slightly smaller so the feathers wouldn’t spread out so much), but transferring the feathers from the old to the new was *not* an easy job, not when the old covers were so full of holes, and I was so busy laughing.

The hoover has been busy today…

Even with all that messing about, it didn’t take me very long, and for the cost of, well, nothing actually (I already had the old sheet) I’ve ended up with two lovely refluffed pillows and a new sofa cushion.

Yes I could have gone and bought new ones, but what a waste, and quite frankly I’d rather spend the money on cakes to eat while reclining elegantly on my new fluffy pillows. Hooray!

Advertisement