Even before I headed off overseas, I had these two yarns and an idea out of the stash and waiting to be tackled. The fluffy yarn is a very soft wool boucle called Mt Pisa, that I bought at Touch Yarns in New Zealand. The warp yarn is Bendigo Woollen Mills Classic 3 ply in ‘almond’.

I’d bought the boucle thinking I’d weave a scarf, but I have plenty of scarves. Then I unwisely washed some throw pillows together and the colour ran, so what had been two cream coloured pillows gained a ‘subtle tie-dye effect’. So after discovering how cool double weave tubes were, I figured I’d weave those pillows some soft, fluffy covers.

So I warped up the loom, got started and immediately discovered something obvious:

This is a quarter of the boucle yarn. I wasn’t going to get one pillow out of it, let alone two. So I dove into the stash and brought out some more New Zealand yarn: Naturally Naturelle, a 10ply/aran wool yarn left over from Starsky.

I worked out that I could work the double weave so I had two shots of boucle followed by two of Naturelle on the front of the pillows, and just Naturelle for the back.

Which make the whole weaving-a-tube thing even cooler. Here’s the front:

Here’s the back:

Then I discovered my second mistake. I had managed to stuff up the warp length calculations, and was coming up a little short on the second pillow. By tying the warp into sections at the back of the loom, then extending it with some scrap yarn, I managed to just squeeze out the second pillow.

Then it was just a matter of tying off and trimming the warp into a fringe, washing and blocking the pillow covers, then slipping them over the old pillows.

Structually, the project all worked out fine it the end. But I’m not 100% satisfied with the final result. The weft is is a little prone to spreading on the back of the pillows, so the fabric really isn’t firm enough for the use I’m putting it to. I’m considering felting it a little, but not so much that I can’t get the original pillows inside any more.

But otherwise, they’re soft and cushy, and do a great job of reviving the dye-stained old pillows.