Soft Touch Local TV News Personality Laurine Jue Creates Works Of Art From Vintage Fabrics
Many of us know Laurine Jue as a news anchor at KREM-2. But she’s also a designer.
Jue creates beautiful pillows from vintage fabrics dating to the early 1900s. She searches antique stores, flea markets, and estate sales for cast-offs which can be used and enjoyed in a recycled form. Many people collect vintage fabrics, she says, but don’t have a real use for them, so they end up stored away in trunks and boxes, rarely to be seen again.
She once purchased four panels of light-green brocade curtains at an estate sale for $40, a price considered high by estate-sale standards. Several people had looked at the curtains, but no one was interested in buying them. After she had made her purchase, she was chastised for paying such a high price. Jue responded: “I have a vision for these curtains.”
What began with elegant Christmas stockings made for a department store in 1993 evolved into a second career for Jue, whose looking for an opportunity to have her own business. After seeking advice from the Small Business Development Center, she concluded stocking were too seasonal to market and wanted a product that had broader appeal; she decided on pillows.
These days, pillows are a popular decorating tool. They are inexpensive when compared to furniture, window coverings and other big-ticket items, and they’re versatile. Pillows can alter the look of a room or freshen a tired sofa.
John Freeze of Freeze Furniture says many decorators choose neutral couches for their clients and add color and pattern with several pillows.
Jue had never considered herself a creative person, but now refers to herself as something of an artist. “I can look at a piece of fabric and see it as a finished project,” explains Jue. She believes what drew her to television was that it is a visual medium.
And Jue credits her mother for insisting that she, while learning to sew as a young girl, rip out crooked topstitching and press fabric correctly. She grew up watching her mother sew, and she and her two sisters made many of their clothes.
Jue sewed for herself through high school, college, and even after beginning her career as a TV reporter. While she couldn’t imagine herself making a living sewing, Jue looks to it now as a way to relieve work-related stress and as a creative outlet. She also finds her work as a designer energizing.
Sewing a pillow doesn’t take a long time, but finding the right fabric and designing the pillow do. Her early-morning hours as an anchor at KREM permit her to find fabrics, choose trims and meet contacts. Because she wants to maintain quality, Jue designs each pillow, sews many, and has only two sewing assistants.
Material recycled for her pillows includes bedspreads, tea towels, linens, curtains, draperies, handkerchiefs and tablecloths. Jue adds new trims such as fringe and braids because of their color, quality and condition, but utilizes them in such a way that they complement, not overpower the pillows.
Perhaps the pillows’ appeal is best-expressed by Denise Struthers Venier, owner of D. Marie Discount Decorating: “When I first saw her pillows I wanted to buy the pillows and then have a sofa made to go with them.”
Laurine chose a polyfiber fill for her pillows because it’s similar to the softness and fluffiness of down but less expensive.
Her pillows range from $25 to $60, and she has a line of table runners for $50 to $80 made from new material. Jue also makes placemats and napkins.
Jue’s pillows are sold at seasonal antique shows at the fairgrounds and at The Hidden Cottage stores, in Coeur d’Alene and at NorthTown and the Crescent Court.