Whip it up

Jody's and my favorite room in our house is "The Colonel Mustard Room".  It has wood paneling (not the kind you are thinking) with raised boxes, bookshelves line the wall on each side of the fireplace and two floor to ceiling windows.  We have a dark brown leather couch and chair and a maroon wing back chair (all very dark) and dark shiny gold curtains (not gaudy, I actually like the curtains!).  It's a very cozy room, but also very dark.  The pictures below are from when we first moved it, we've taken out the rug & gotten a new coffee table since these pictures were taken, but just to give you an idea...

I decided the other day if I just lightened up the pillows on the couch/chairs and put up lighter curtains it would make a huge difference and make the room lighter-thanks HGTV for the idea:)   So off I went to Target, then WalMart, then Ross, in search of pillows...but they were all too expensive for me (I needed 8 pillows)!  I decided to try Garden Ridge (a home goods store) and found some pillows I absolutely loved and Jody liked them too, they were also pricey so we bought 2 to use as a starting off point (picture to the left)!  

I had found some plain off-white curtain panels earlier on sale (of course) at Target and bought those too.  Just the new curtains made the room seem lighter and the 2 new pillows also made a difference.  I always have fabric hanging around from other projects (I can't ever seem to get rid of any of it), so I decided to dig around to see what I could find!  I found an old curtain that we had used in our very first house about 9 years ago!  I can't believe I kept it for this long, but it was a great find!!!  The curtain fabric isn't exactly the texture I had wanted, but the right color I needed, so it worked!  I just cut the fabric to the size of the pillow, folded it over to make a cover so I could take it off and wash it (super important with kiddos) then sewed them together-3 seams because I used the finished edges from the curtain!  I even had some scrap fabric a friend (she has a drapery business) gave to me two Christmas's ago (that I used for another project) that I used to make the large & small rectangular pillows (see bottom picture)!  

I love to repurpose and reuse and be creative as much as I can all while saving money!  Thanks to my Home Economics teacher in 7th grade for teaching me how to sew!!!  Here are the pillows I ended up making out of scrap fabric-cost me NOTHING but my time (only about 2 hours)!!!  Granted these are NOT designer pillows, but they serve a purpose and that's all that matters to me!

What can you whip up in an afternoon?

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UPDATE
So sorry for not putting up the afters!!!  Here is the room as it looks today :)  It's still kinda dark, but it feels much better to me...and I took these pictures with my phone!