Crocheted Cushion

The Crocheted Cushion Cover

If you’ve read the japanese grass hat blog, you’ll know how this one came about.

Short version – What I actually wanted to do was to make a crocheted item that involved “difficult yarn”, and my crochet skills were a bit rusty, so I came up with the idea that I should do a different crochet project first with “simple yarn” to get some practice and (re)learning. And if you’re me, that normally means having a look at the books I already have in the house for patterns/inspiration, and seeing if I can find something I can make with Shetland yarn, since I always have cones and cones of J&S in the house because of my machine knitting.

The pattern I came across that caught my eye was a quite stunning crocheted cushion cover that was included in one of the old companion guides for Edinburgh Yarn Festival – an awesome yarn festival that unfortunately doesn’t run any more (although I just realised that a replacement one did run this year – https://www.woollygood.co.uk/ – and I totally missed it!).

This cushion cover really captured the fair isle spirit – the colour choices in the original had that sort of light-shifting affect that you often see in Shetland knitting. Something I’d happily give house space to, and equally importantly, something that was designed to be made with Shetland yarn so I didn’t have to do any yarn substitution swatching and re-gauging.

First time I’ve crocheted a cushion cover. And a very long time since I’ve made anything with granny squares that required me to join it all together when done with the fun crochet part. I’m one of those people who goes out of their way to avoid seaming and/or finishing of ends. Still, since this was supposed to be a learning project, I slavishly followed the pattern instructions, even knowing that there was a world of hell finishing waiting for me once I was done with the crochet.

I got into a bit of a tis with this one, I’ll admit. On the colour choices. I was choosing from what was in the house already – which was a reasonable amount of cones, but only small amounts of balled Shetland yarn.

Quite a lot of cones to choose from – most of these are Shetland jumper weight – but kinda muted colours.

The original colour scheme was all about mainly using neutrals, but adding a couple of pop colours in small amounts (in their case, the turquoise and yellow). I wanted to do greys for my neutrals and then reds for my pop colours. My options for greys were limited – and so somehow along the line I ended up choosing a dark grey, a mid grey, a so-light-it-was-almost-white grey, and a red (??). And then another red, and a yellow, for my “pop”. Not maybe as cool and sophisticated as the original, but should have been good enough. The right number of light/mid/dark, which is kinda what I care about with patterns.

Should have been good enough. But when I started crocheting – and I had to match up my colours with the letters used in the pattern – I got it a bit confused and kinda invented my own colour pattern. I wasn’t quite understanding the individual sections of the pattern and how it would come together when I tried to envisage it in my head. And once I had made enough squares to lay them out and see how it would come together, I wasn’t willing to rip them out and start again, so I just continued! What I made has a completely different look than the one in the pattern – but that just makes it unique, right? There’s no crochet cushion cover police that are going to come and get me in the middle of the night for my crimes against the pattern…

And here it is – my Finished Object. Here’s the front.

And here’s the back. Kinda loving my button choices (notice the mismatch – I only had 3 of the chestnut brown leather but I found an odd button in darker brown that I think goes quite well.

In the end, I decided I do love it. And I now feel the need to replace the rest of my dull grey IKEA cushion covers with some handmade ones. Watch this space – more cushion covers are likely to turn up soon. Maybe knitted ones though. Or at least ones that don’t require so much finishing.

And as soon as I typed that, I remembered that there’s an Unfinished Object hiding in one of my cupboards which is destined to be a knitted cushion cover – made up in little squares that all need their ends sewn in and stitching together… Oh my.