PHILADELPHIA -- Painting a room a new color can be a major chore. Picking out furniture can be a project, and waiting for it to arrive can be a marathon. "They're instant gratification," says Monica Walker-Miraglilo, who has turned that idea into a business. Fill-a-Pillow, her shop just outside of Philadelphia in Haverford Station, Pa., lets DIY designers choose from hundreds of fabrics and trims to create their own accent pillows, which the shop's seamstresses sew up and deliver within three days. At the catered "pillow parties" Walker-Miraglilo offers at the store for adults and kids, guests get to walk away with their creations the same day. If this sounds a little bit like a Build-A-Bear Workshop with pillows, that's no accident. Walker-Miraglilo (pronounced Mur-ag-leo) and husband Michael, her business partner, originally wanted to open one of the toy bear-making franchises in Ocean City, N.J. "Then we found out there already was one," she says. "So my husband said, `Why don't you do the same thing with pillows?' I said, `You're a genius."' For years, she had designed pillows, made from vintage scarves, to give to clients of her interior decorating business. That venture was a sideline to her career as a fashion model. (Walker-Miraglilo, who has worked the runways for top designers and was once pictured on a Budweiser billboard, appears regularly on QVC.) Model-slim just three weeks after giving birth to her second child, Walker-Miraglilo, 38, got into decorating through an unusual route. "I bought a house and I didn't have any money," she says. "So I started going to Home Depot and asking guys how to do things." Then single, she embarked on a home renovation. "I knocked down walls, drywalled, painted. I did a terra-cotta tile floor and a whole slate bathroom." Friends began asking her to redo their homes after they saw hers, and those projects led to others. "My business was all word-of-mouth," says Walker-Miraglilo, who created a sleek, sophisticated look for her shop with chocolate walls, a button-tufted white vinyl and faux cowhide banquette, and an antique Asian table that becomes a workspace during pillow parties. Though she quit the de
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