Decorative Throw Pillows

Decorative throw pillows are one of the easiest ways to jazz up a room that you don't know what to do with. Up until about a year ago, they seemed like a perfectly trivial addition to a room, but now I can't do without them. When we were redoing our living room, They proved to be the one thing that brought the whole room together. Our couch already had a nice turquoise fabric that we were pretty much married to, But it did not quite go with the bamboo floor that we were planning to install. Meanwhile, neither the couch nor the floor went with our wall art which had an understated gray and black palette.

When we added a few decorative throw pillows into the mix, however, It brought everything together in a way that surprised my whole family. We had some decorative pillow covers made which combined all the colors of the room's palette, while somehow still looking natural and not "forced." There were touches of brown to bring out the floor, turquoise along with a complimentary orange to harmonize with the couch and even a gray and silver patterned border that brought the cushions into synch with the wall art - The one thing that we had thought would be irreconcilable with the rest of the room. We put two cushions on the couch and a third one on the love seat and, suddenly, the whole room just worked!

Since then, we have become big fans of decorative throw pillows, as you might imagine, and they have become a sort of unifying theme for our entire house. Our upstairs bar and TV room, the guest bedroom, and even our master bedroom use decorative pillows to add color and softness. In the guest bedroom, they have a folksy, primitive look to go with the aesthetic of the room. In the master bedroom, we have purple and blue pillows to go with the relaxing color palette we prefer there.

Because each room has a very specific palette to match, we spent a lot of money on having custom pillows and pillow cases made. Recently, however, I learned that you can make your own decorative throw pillow without a lot of expertise. Buy  a premade pillow without a case, find a fabric pattern you really like, and you can put the two together in an afternoon if you have some basic fabric skills. As I develop my sewing skills, I plan to experiment with making more elaborate and interesting pillows as gifts for friends.