September 1963: Use up your left-overs

This month’s project was a crocheted cushion “to use up your wool left-overs.” It was promised to be “very quickly and easily made”, and it was! Nota bene, today is September 5th, I started this project on the evening of September 1st, and it is already finished, including blocking and photographing. I don’t think I have ever made any project, no matter how small, that went this fast.

It’s designed for DK wool and the original colours are black, flamingo pink, silver and white. Of course, I used leftovers of DK wool that I had in stash, and they happened to be more in the blue and green spectrum. The black is Jamieson’s Double Knitting left over from this blazer, the dark grey and turquoise are Reginella wool-alpaca mix from Chile left over from a non-vintage project, the more blue-blue is lovely Schoeller&Stahl left over from swatch knitting, the slightly darker green is Drops Lima left over from another non-vintage project and the lighter green is not technically a left-over, but hand-dyed wool from a knitting colleague. Yay, I used up some leftovers! The pattern is a standard granny-square shell stitch which just continues around to make… two giant granny squares.

I worked on both squares (front and back of cushion cover) at the same time in alternatum and was glad I did, because I ran out of some colours sooner than expected and had to adjust the colour scheme accordingly. I like how the colours turned out. The finished size in the pattern is 13 inches square, but I happened to have a cover-less cushion in the sewing drawer that was about 15 inches square, so I added another colour pattern repeat to make it fit. I considered dyeing the cushion turquoise, since I had some fabric dye and the crochet is fairly hole-y, but in the end I thought the white cushion showing through gave the dark colours in the crochet work a bit more pop. The edges of the two squares are crocheted together on the right side.

What more is there to say? I now have time to finish all those WIPs, so stay tuned for progress on the August 1963 cardigan… and the April 1963 embroidered blackwork cushion… and the I-don’t-even-remember-when-I-started-it-it’s-been-so-long epic Jacobean appliqué cushion. So many cushions, not enough sofas! Here’s one, at least.