My friend Liz Dunn gave me these two huge, black velvet pillows years ago, back when I didn't really have enough seating for TV night. But since my new apartment's "color scheme" is pretty bright, the dark pillows didn't really go, so I decorated them with these great fabric placemats I found on sale in Santa Cruz.

Notice how well the cushion coordinates with my HUGE television, especially when the aquarium tape is playing.

I thought this was going to be a super easy project, just start stitching and go. But even though I pinned everything down ahead of time, the placemats still migrated as I sewed, so they'd either be super off-center or there'd be horrible wrinkles underneath them. I probably would have been better off cutting up the sham and sewing everything together properly, like with a machine, but I wanted to be able to take the placemats off if I got sick of them, so I just wound up doing each pillow about three separate times, which was a pain because I used really, really teensy stitches.

Pretty dumb!