One of our clients Barbara Hoskinson at Rosebank Design asked me to come to a horse barn to talk about several pillows that she wanted us to make. I was in for a big surprise. The first thing I saw when I walked in was a jokey jacket in a shadow box. The barn's owner's father was a well known jockey, and that was his jacket displayed on the wall.
Barbara based the pillow design on this jacket and decided to have the pillows made from a durable ultrasuede.
It was quite a challenge to make these pillows; each took 8 hours! And that is not including the time it took me to calculate the width of each stripe so we use blue and yellow colors as many times as possible and gray as few times as possible as it was requested.
Since ultrasuede doesn't press at all, Santiago, one of our sewers who was working on them, had to glue each seam allowance down so they don't move around once the insert is inside.
After a long discussion, all strips were cut across the width, not on bias (yes, even ultrasuede stretches when cut on bias). Then came another idea; there are buttons on the jacket. Why don't we buttons instead of zippers? We got a "yes" from Barbara and made a button closure with fabric covered buttons. Look how pretty these button holes look!
The pillows turned out beautifully! That is all that matters.
And I was very lucky to take a close look at one of the most beautiful creatures on the earth: horses:
