Pom Pom Cushion

Well hello everyone. This is my first blog post for the Minerva Crafts Blogger Network. So you’ll find a copy of this on their site today too. This has given me real opportunity to work outside my stash! I thoroughly enjoyed riffling through the Minerva website to find the materials for the projects I had in mind.

I was thrilled to receive my first parcel. Not so thrilled when the parcel was delivered 4 days after its due date meaning I had one less weekend to make up my first project. Hey ho.

With the heightened interest in the Clover Pom Pom makers, featured on Kirstie Allsop’s Christmas show, I was keen to find another use for the humble pom pom beyond bobble hats and gift wrapping.

So here we go, my Pom pom cushion.

Some practice pom pom making with my pom pom maker and a 100g ball of aran weight yarn allowed me to work out how many pom poms I would get from each 100g and how ‘full’ I wanted the pom poms to be. I also realised that it was fairly tricky to get your pom poms all the same size/fullness by ‘eye’ and I wanted an even size across my cushion. My cushion will be 5 pom poms wide by 5 pom poms deep. 25 pom poms! I drew up a little diagram to work out how many I would need of each colour.

So my first job with my new Stylecraft aran weight yarn was to wind each 100g ball into 12g balls, giving 8 balls per 100g, 2 balls for each pom pom. This didn’t take long; about 1.5 hrs to wind up 7 x 100g balls although my OH thought me a little strange winding and weighing out yarn in front of the TV.

Then the fun bit, making the pom poms.
I used the blue ‘large’ pom pom maker. They are incredibly easy to use. Just open them out and wind the wool evenly around the arc. Then close them up and while holding it together cut within the groves as shown.

Then tie a length of yarn around the middle, wrapping around twice and tying tightly with a good old granny knot.

Notice I have used string around my pom pom. This is because I want to tie it onto my cushion. I would be concerned about the robustness of using the yarn to do this. You won’t see it any way. Notice also I have left a decent length of string. Your pom poms may need a little trim.

Next the cushion cover. I do not intend to be washing this cushion cover. You could try, the yarn is acrylic and designed for frequent washing but I wouldn’t recommend it! With that in mind I have not bothered with a zip or an envelope closure. Purely your preference. My cushion pad measures 40cm x 40cm. But I made up my actual cushion cover 35cm x 35cm. (The addition of the poms will make it larger then this). I cut open the pad and removed about a third of the stuffing before sewing it back up.

Before assembling the cover, you need to make a way of fixing the pom poms. I came up with this. 5 strips of the cushion fabric 4cm wide, 40cm long, folded lengthways, pressed and sown.

Then I attached 5 strips 6cm apart as shown in the image below before assembling the cushion.
Do you see that I have left gaps along the stitching? Starting from the middle I marked every 6cm along the strip and left a gap at this point. This is how I will tie the pompoms onto the cushion pad. After a run through with the pom poms I went back and tied the front of the cushion to the back with a long needle and a couple of buttons.
This made the cushion ‘flatter’ which made the pom poms sit more snuggly together.

Then all you have to do is tightly tie the pom poms onto the cushion, pulling the string and knotting it really tightly before cutting off the ends.
And voila!

So there we go. My daughter said it was ‘cool’. That’s enough praise for me.

I hope you enjoyed my first Minerva Crafts post. Looking forward to the next one!

Love, Lucie xx