Month: July 2023

July 1965: “Pansies” Garden Cushion

This month’s project was an appliquéd and embroidered cushion. Or, as the description in the magazine put it:

Attractive appliqué cushions in hardwearing hessian add a gay touch for garden lounging — ideal for deckchair comfort or to use on the lawn. Children will love them too, and they are tough enough to stand up to the rough-and-tumble of garden play.

Two cushion designs are given, one with autumn leaves and one with pink and purple pansies. I chose the pansies, which were bright and fun and very 1960s. As luck would have it, I had exactly the right amount of pink and purple felt in stash, and almost enough green embroidery thread for the stems and leaves, so I didn’t have to buy many materials and could use the project to de-stash. I did have to buy the backing fabric, and decided on a tough decorating/upholstery cotton instead of real Hessian fabric (aka burlap, jute, gunny-sack), since I don’t think this cushion will be subjected to any “rough-and-tumble of garden play” on my friend’s balcony.

Since I didn’t have a transfer, I made a little paper pattern for the felt petals, estimating the size based on the amount of felt and the size of the background fabric. One modern “standard size” piece of decorating felt made exactly 18 petals and I think it came very close to whatever size the original transfer pattern was. I overlapped the leaves in a sort of pinwheel layer (following the helpful illustration), using a little bit of stick glue to help keep them in place, and then secured them with pins. For placement, I simply folded the background fabric in quarters and used the fold lines for the two middle axes, then measured evenly from there for the corner flowers.

I sewed the flowers down with matching thread and added the yellow centres. The diagram shows them a bit above or below the actual centre of the petals, but I like symmetry, so I made the yellow pieces more round and put them right on the centre. (The layers of felt weren’t too heavy.)

All that was left to do after that was the leaf and stem embroidery, which was done in easy stem-stitch in green thread. The pattern didn’t say how many strands of thread to use, but seeing as it was a bold design, I used all six threads together and ran out of thread. (Up until this point, I had done all of the work in one day, but alas, I had to pause because it was Saturday late afternoon and the shops wouldn’t open again until Monday.)

Monday came, I bought more thread and finished the surface of the cushion. Sewing it up was easy enough. I had enough muslin in stash to make up one half of the inner cushion pad (pro tip: the inner cushion should always be a little bit larger than the outer cover, to prevent sagging) and enough of the beige cotton to make the other half. I did not, as suggested in the pattern, line the pad with plastic to make it waterproof “for use on the grass”. After making the pad, I had exactly enough beige fabric left to make strips for “piping”, so added that as well (not part of the original design). It was not “real” piping, which is made on a bias strip, and thus came out a bit uneven. Oh well. At least the zipper was no problem this time.

And that was that! I stuffed the inner cushion with fluff, sewed it up, zipped it into the cover and voilà. I have no garden, no balcony and too many cushions already, so this will be a gift for a friend.

July 1965: Overview

July is still “holiday” season over at Stitchcraft, but this summery issue is already looking towards cooler autumn temperatures and the return to post-holiday life. For women’s fashions, this means a “revival of the more feminine line” (as if there were ever a fashion for “the masculine line” in 1960s women’s fashions.) I guess they mean a slightly closer-fitting silhouette, or a little more shaping of upper-body garments between hem and bust. At the same time, “quick and easy yarns” or “easy-to-wear loose front styling” jackets are still in fashion, emphasising comfort and wearability.

Our cover model sports a white blouse made in 4-ply “Cameo Crepe” wool and twisted stocking-stitch for a little more texture. The navy blue accents on shoulder and pocket match the knitted skirt, which is just below-knee length. That may seem surprising if you associate mid-1960s fashions with miniskirts, but it took a while for the ideas of cutting-edge designers like Mary Quant or André Courrèges to trickle down to the general public, and hand-knitting magazines, even the more fashionable / aspirational ones, were oriented towards designs that “regular people” could wear in everyday life . The dresses and skirts in Vogue Knitting’s 1965 Spring/Summer issue, for example, all fall between just-barely-above and solidly-below knee-length — and Stitchcraft was a more conservative magazine than Vogue Knitting. We won’t be seeing miniskirts here for a while yet.

The upper-body fashions for women show, if not an extreme “revival of the feminine line”, a definite attention to cute colour and pattern details, particularly in the use of twisted stitches or ribbing variants. The pink raglan pullover on the inside front cover combines a sort of twisted rib on the sides with a “v” pattern, also made by twisting stitches, up the front and back midline and on the sleeves, and tops ot off with a black necktie bow. Nice touch to put it on a red-haired model! The combination of colour detail and ribbing variant (here: stranded panel and narrow slip-stitch rib) is also used on the warm blue-and-white cardigan. The “knitting that looks like crochet” trend continues in a short-sleeved blouse for larger sizes in 4-ply wool and a textured-lace pattern.

The men’s fashions use a predictably less dainty, but no less interesting use of colour and pattern: there’s a loose.fitting, sideways-knit and vertically-striped dolman-sleeve shirt for beach wear in “father and son” sizes for adults and children (though the “adult” model in the photo looks hardly older than a teenager himself) and a slipover in an Aran-style pattern of cables, ridges and zig-zags.

The kids’ designs utilise the same fashion features as the adults: the boys’ striped shirt is the exact same pattern as “Father’s”, and there’s a zip-neck pullover for girls with a stranded border reminiscent of the panel in the womens’ jacket. For younger girls, there’s a quick and easy, slightly striped pullover whose pattern details are embroidered on after knitting. Nautical white and blue, pretty pink and sunny yellow make up the summer colour palette.

There’s a good selection of easy homeware and embroidery projects: appliquéd garden cushions in “hardwearing hessian” fabric, single flowers cross-stitched on place mats “for an outdoor supper party”, embroidered “needle etchtings” of village scenes (Godshill and Shanklin Old Village on the Isle of Wight), or an easy stitched rug.

The Danish-design tapestry cushions look more complicated than they are, but are also more complicated than the usual tapestry cushions. Fans of finer work in cotton can make doilies or a traycloth, or pretty trims for bed pillows.

The ads are quite usual: Singer sewing machines, Patons yarns, and a swirly nightgown and negligée from the Scotch Wool Shop. Not to forget: the Turmix knitting machine, Stitchcraft binding cases to store a year’s worth of magazines, and order houses for wools, fabric remnants, etc. The children’s comic follows the adventures of Jill and James searching for a lost stitch and encountering interesting characters such as Spinning Jenny, who shows them how a spinning machine works.

That’s all for this issue! My project will be the appliquéd flower cushion.