The ‘Where am I?’ cushion

Hayden and I were given 3 massive feather filled cushion inners not long after we moved in a couple of years ago, and until now only 1 has been covered and usable. The other 2 have lain forlorn and naked in the corner of the front room, with me pretending I can’t see them…

About 3 weeks ago, I felt a sudden and strong urge to make something, make anything, and I wanted a quick, instant gratification project to get my sewing fix! Enough was enough, a cushion cover must be made, and I dug out one of the cushions ready to make it a lovely new cover.

I bought this cotton remnant from a stall at the Knitting and Stitching Show at Olympia in early 2015, and had earmarked it way back when as a wall hanging project, but when I got it home I realised the irregular map print just wouldn’t look as nice as a proper map would, so into the stash it was flung, just waiting to be made up into something soft and squishy. A few weeks later I visited the Rag Market in Birmingham for the first time and picked out a soft khaki coloured cotton as a backing… and then that ended up in the stash too! There it sat until earlier this year, when I dug both pieces out to find an invisible zip that matched. But then it all went back into the stash again!

Until now! When the urge to sew struck, I knew I had to get my fix, and a simple cushion cover seemed like the obvious instant gratification choice. In terms of construction it was very simple, even though it turned out the map fabric was too narrow for the cushion inner! Only by a teensy bit so I made the cover as big as I could and squished the inner into the cover. It’s fine, it’s functional! Just don’t use it in a pillow fight as it might pop!

I started by cutting fabric pieces as big as the cushion inner plus as much seam allowance as I could manage. I think I used 0.5cm in the end just to make the measurements easier to work out. Then I inserted the invisible zip along one edge of the front and backing fabrics, joining the pieces to form a rectangle but leaving a few centimetres at each end to allow for tidy square corners and a neater zip opening. Then, placing right sides together with the zip opened up to at least halfway, I stitched around the squares to make the cover, making sure to stitch a little further along than each end of the zip to make sure the opening was neat. Once that was done, I trimmed the seam allowance a little and then used a zigzag stitch to neaten the edges and turned it all through.

The insides are by no means perfect, but the whole project took about an hour from start to finish and definitely scratched the sewing itch! It actually sits really well against the first cushion I made! Not sure what to do with the other one – our sofa in the front room is running out of space!

Advertisement