Pura Lana Vergine

With the book done and the tour over I’m trying to take a little time to settle and get to some rather neglected things before jumping into the next big project. Mostly that means cleaning and organising, but I took a little break from that this evening to replace one of my boring cushion covers with something a little more interesting, and which crucially does not clash horribly with Nathaniel the way the old one did. I have plans for a matchy but not the same partner for it.

A little distraction from the cleaning, that did at least help declutter something. The fair isle is from a jumper my aunt knit (by machine) years ago. My mum gave it to me a while ago, since it had shrunk to sort of my size. In order to wear it I’d have had to change the too tight neckline and I put it away thinking I might do that someday. However, when I pulled it out during the aforementioned decluttering I noticed a couple of holes and that the felting wasn’t particularly even. Not really worth the effort of trying to make a wearable garment, but perfect for using as a cushion cover. The simplest thing to do would have been to just sew across the bottom and below the armholes, but that wouldn’t have been quite big enough for my cushion. So I pieced a couple of strips of the jumper together with some wool suiting fabric, which has been hanging on my kitchen wall since I took the photo for the book cover. While it was up there I fell a little in love with the lettering along the selvedges, a functional label that would usually be hidden but that seems perfect in a room full of wool, even if all of the wool used in the cushion wasn’t exactly virgin.