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.