The Darwin cushion

Still home but the penicillin is finally kicking in so I’m feeling much better than I did at the start of the week, just tired and my throat is still a bit swollen but much more comfy. It’s definitely an improvement on yesterday and Monday – I’ve even managed to stay awake all morning, unlike yesterday when a short walk to buy painkillers knocked me out for over an hour! Back to work tomorrow, regardless of how tired I am – there is only so much daytime TV I can stand. I currently have a 20 year old episode of A Touch of Frost on in the background… No new project just yet as I’m waiting for some fabric to arrive from Fabricland but I did make this recently and this post has been queued for ages so I thought I’d share it!

Screenshot from ikea.com, link to fabric is in post although not available online

Hayden and I were recently given 3 massive cushion inners from a work colleague as she no longer needed them. She had sold the covers on Ebay but she didn’t need naked inners any more so we gladly accepted them. And then they sat in a pile in the front room for a few months. Ooops.

As mentioned in a previous post, a few months ago I finally sorted out my sewing room in our new house (OK so we’ve been here nearly a year now…) with some new furniture from Ikea, and during that quite expensive trip, I picked up some great furnishing fabric to cover one of the giant cushions. It’s quite heavy but it is 100% cotton, and was really cheap too! I only bought 1 metre as the fabric is quite wide and I knew this would just about be enough to cover one cushion.

I measured the cushion (27″)and decided to make a proper zipped but unlined cushion cover. I measured and cut out 2 large squares including 2cm seam allowance. I will admit that this was a bit of a cobbled job as I wanted to just have a go at making a proper cover, although it is a simple enough for even a beginner sewist – you just measure 2 squares large enough to cover your cushion, attach a zip to an edge on each square using your preferred method of choice and then stitch up! You don’t have to line, trim it or even finish the seams if you don’t want to!

Once the squares were cut out, I inserted the invisible zip to create a rectangle with the fastening in the middle. I hadn’t sewn an invisible zip into such heavy fabric before so this took several attempts and lots of unpicking to get it to lie correctly, but after the fourth attempt it was perfect (ish) and I was ready to move on. Inserting the zip was the most tricky part as I had no pattern matching to do, no piped edges, no pleats or fiddly shapes to work with, just a nice simple (huge) square! to complete the cover, I simply placed the fabric right sides together with the zip slightly undone so it was ready to be turned out, and then stitched round the edge , making sure to reinforce the stitching in each corner. Once done I trimmed the seam allowance slightly, clipped the corners to make a neat corner and then zigzagged to tidy it up a bit as I don’t have an overlocker, sob. Once this had a quick press, I noticed it wasn’t a true square and slightly veers off a bit, but it’s barely noticeable when empty and invisibly wonky when on the cushion, so I’m going to claim it as my artistic vision! I loved the fabric for this on sight, I love old scientific drawings and bugs, hence the name Darwin – everyone else seems to name their projects and it’s a lovely idea so I’m going to name some of mine!

I do have a little bit of this fabric left over that might do for a smaller scatter cushion or maybe even a small bag. For now it will disappear into the depths of the stash, never to be seen again. Well, for a while anyway…

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