Hurrah for Oxford!
I am about to embark on an interesting little job. Normally I would simply go and buy new, but that isn't possible just at the moment, so....
My lovely thick comfortable feather pillow that my mother gave me burst some time last week, about four inches along one seam. I discovered this when I was changing the bedding on Thursday and when I took the outer pillowcase off, there were feathers everywhere. So I frantically stuffed them all back into it and put the whole lot outside the back door, outer pillow-case, under-pillow-case and pillow, whilst I thought for a while, then investigated and discovered the split seam... Urgh! Tiny feathers feel horrible when you are rootling among them to find out what's going on inside what amounts to a large cloth bag.
Thank the powers it's been a fine two days. Whenever I've felt strong enough to face it I've gone outside and done a bit more feather-wrangling, which is boring and difficult and sneezy and fiddly and needs a lot of concentration. The outer pillow-case was almost easy, just needing to be taken off carefully and denuded of all its stray feathers, but the rest was a horrible job.
Yesterday afternoon I had finally retrieved the last feathers that I could from the under-pillow-case and corralled them into the ticking case of the actual pillow, then turned the under-pillow-case wrong side out and flapped it in the breeze to get rid of the very last of the feathers, and finally used safety-pins to cobble the side-seam together very carefully so no more feathers could escape, then brought the under-pillow-case in and put it into the delayed bedding-wash with the rest of the bedding, and the pillow in a large cardboard box ready to do the actual repair.
And now I am sitting looking at it and wondering how to mend from inside a pillow full of feathers. I mean, I'd feel safer if it were done by machine, but how? What sort of seam? Argh?
I rather wish if it had to burst it would have done it when it was at the dry-cleaners in the autumn instead of waiting and doing it at me.
Wish me luck. Or else wish me strength of purpose, because I keep thinking of other little household tasks that I really ought to do first, like going up into the loft to see if I can work out why the water-tank is occasionally leaking through the bathroom ceiling!