The first cool night of the season came last Thursday, down to 44 by dawn, and I woke up to find Lila had dragged the knitted afghan off the back of the couch and into her bed sometime after midnight. Pepper was under it too, naturally. That afghan has lived on the couch, decorative and ignored, since April. It took one chilly night for somebody to remember what it was for. That's when I knew it was time for the fall shuffle.
Every November I'm tempted by the stacks of new throws and pillow covers in every store, and every November I try to walk past them. Not because there's anything wrong with them, but because our house already has more soft things than we use. They're just in the wrong places.
Shopping the house first
On Saturday morning I pulled out everything we own that's soft and fits in a pile: the cedar chest at the foot of our bed, the top shelf of the hall closet, the bin under Lila's bed, the basket on the screened porch. I laid it all out on the living room rug. It was a humbling heap.
- Two wool blankets from the cedar chest, one plaid and one a plain cream
- A pieced quilt from Ben's grandmother, too pretty to use, so we never did
- The knitted afghan, now promoted
- Three fleece throws of various vintages
- Nine pillow covers, at least four of which I'd forgotten I owned
- Two flannel shirts of Ben's with holes in the elbows
Lila sorted them into "soft" and "scratchy," which turned out to be a more useful system than mine.
Three loose rules for layering
I'm not a decorator, but after a few years of doing this I've settled into some habits that keep the living room cozy rather than cluttered.
1. Mix textures before colors
Our couch is a plain gray that has seen things. What makes it look warm in winter isn't a color scheme, it's the mix of surfaces: something knitted, something woven, something smooth. This year that's the afghan folded over one arm, the plaid wool blanket draped across the back, and the cream one in a basket on the floor. Three textures, and suddenly the gray looks intentional.
2. One pattern, everything else quiet
The plaid is our pattern this season. Everything else around it stays solid or nearly so. When I've tried two or three patterns at once, the couch ends up looking like a yard sale table, and not in a charming way.
3. Everything has to be usable
This rule is why the quilt finally came out. If it's too precious to touch, it goes back in the chest. Ben's grandmother made that quilt to be slept under, and I decided she'd much rather it be on our bed with a dog print in it than folded in tissue for another decade. It's on our bed now. Pepper has already approved it.
Making new from old
The two flannel shirts became pillow covers on Sunday afternoon. I'm a basic sewer at best, so I used the simplest method I know, which needs no zipper:
- Button the shirt all the way up and turn it inside out.
- Lay a pillow insert on top and trace a square about half an inch bigger on every side.
- Pin and sew around all four sides, straight through front and back.
- Trim the extra fabric, turn right side out through the buttoned placket, and unbutton to slip the insert in.
The buttons end up running down the front like a little detail, and the old flannel is wonderfully soft from years of washing. Total cost: one spool of thread I already had. They took about forty minutes each, including the time I spent re-threading the machine.
Freshening the rest
Everything that had been in storage got washed on a cool, gentle cycle and dried outside on the line, which takes care of the closet smell better than anything I can buy. The wool blankets I aired on the porch for a breezy afternoon rather than washing, since they only needed freshening. Flat, tired pillow inserts got a fifteen-minute tumble in the dryer with a couple of clean tennis balls, which brought most of them back to life. Two were beyond saving and became Pepper's new bed filling.
Where everything ended up
By Sunday evening, the living room had its fall clothes on. Two of the fleece throws went to Lila's room, where she builds forts out of them anyway. The summer pillow covers, the thin cotton ones in pale blue, went into the cedar chest to wait for April. One fleece throw lives in the car now, for football games and cold mornings at the bus stop.
The house will be a little warmer by the end of the month, too. A crew is coming to top up the attic insulation, something we've been planning since a home energy audit back in May. Until then, the blankets are doing a lot of the work, and I don't mind one bit. There's something about pulling a wool blanket over your knees in the evening that no thermostat can quite match.
I spent nothing this year except an afternoon and a little thread. Lila has asked whether the afghan can stay in her room permanently. We're still negotiating.
