Photoshop :: Covering A Selection With Netting

Covering with a netting. There must be an easier was, but, here is how I do it - I need to learn a better way.

1) I have photo of a large yellow pillow on top of a blue sofa. I want to apply netting over the pillow.
2) I create a "netting image" (using mspaint, really quick) large enough to cover the pillow, with 2-pixel-wide diagonal lines and white spaces in between of about 8 pixels. This file is opened under mspaint, and copied all to the clipboard.
3) In CS2, with my sofa jpg opened, I duplicate the background layer, giving me a "background.copy" layer, and I hide the original background layer.
4) I use the magic wand and quick mask brush to select the pillow, then I delete it (from background.copy)
5) I paste from the clipboard, giving me a 3rd layer (layer1) consisting of the black on white net large enough to cover the pillow - this new layer gets automatically selected.
6) I use the magic wand, with "contiguous" unticked, and select all the white spaces between the lines - then I delete these white spaces.
7) I move the background.copy layer on top of layer1 (the net layer), and I see my sofa with the pillow deleted but with the mesh showing in the deleted space where the pillow should be, but nowhere else.
8) I show the original layer "background", and the yellow pillow now appears, but the netting lines are showing over it, and nowhere else.
9) I flatten the image and its done.

Two things - this is really involved for something so simple as covering an object with a netting. And, I don't know how to bellow and squish (distort) the netting to reflect a truer picture of how it would look around the edges (the netting should be more compressed close to the edges to reflect a true 3d picture of how it would look - something like the "Sphere" option from the Dstort filter - but, for non-spherical random shapes.