Bobble cushion

This cushion is a knock-off of a similar one I saw for sale in John Lewis:

John Lewis cushion

The cushion is 20.5" x 14" finished size, which meant I could just lop a bit off one side of the template I used for all the others.

The main part of the cushion is grey wool suiting that I had lying around.  Not ideal as it has a bit of stretch, so I had to be careful to use fusible interfacing on the button back.  For a tutorial on the button back, see here.  I reduced the number of buttons to two and used the same pink contrast fabric as the front.

There was an old man of the Hague, whose ideas were excessively vague; he built a balloon to examine the moon, that deluded old man of the Hague.

The front design is an Edward Lear illustration traced onto cream cotton and embroidered with back-stitch in two strands of dark grey floss.  After stitching it, I trimmed it down and pressed the edges under so that it finished as a 6.25" square.  I mounted this on pink fabric which had been pressed into a neat 7" square.  I then stitched this to the cushion front.  Each time I added a fabric layer, I secured it with machine top-stitching in matching thread.

Basting the bobbles to the front fabric before attaching to the back of the cushion.

The bobbles come on a woven strip; I had to use a double thickness to get the bobbles spaced so close.  I basted the tape along the short edges of the front piece on the right side with the bobbles facing inward toward the centre, making sure the tape did not extend further than the 1/2" seam allowance.  This meant that when I stitched the front and back together, the seam would run over the bobble-stalks.  When the cushion is turned right-way-out, the bobbles are sticking out of the seam, while the tape is concealed inside.

This tutorial is part of a series: