The Battle of Stamford Bridge

Reading this blog, you may think that knitting is my only crafty endeavour. That is not so.  I absolutely cannot crochet - I have tried many times, following written instructions, with one to one tuition and watching online video tutorials.  It seems that is one craft that fuses my brain cells.  One I enjoy almost as much as knitting is cross stitch.  I love the way pictures build up simply by sewing small crosses of designated colour onto the fabric.  It is good for me to do it from time to time.  When I knit, I am told it is at pace.  I never gave it a thought as I hardly ever find myself knitting alongside others but I have been told this now by many people.  Cross stitch is definitely a craft you cannot do fast.

As with knitting, I like to design cross stitch patterns.  The first I did was as a wedding anniversary gift for my husband which depicted our wedding day.  It was simple in that it was just words and symbols in essence so I could design it all on graph paper.  I thought I might like to do more adventurous designs so purchased some software that would translate photographs or pictures into cross stitch patterns.

I think I may have mentioned my software purchase at work because I recall a colleague said he thought the Chelsea badge would make an excellent cross stitch.  No surprise, he was an ardent Chelsea Football Club supporter.

Some months later, he announced that he was leaving having secured a new job.  I recalled his comment about the cross stitching of a Chelsea badge and set about finding a copy and running it through the software though not with the intention of cross stitching it.  No, I had decided that more interesting would be to knit it up.  I figured that when I designed my knitting patterns I used graph paper and that the software output was essentially graph paper designs in colour so it should be pretty straightforward.  Of course a knitted badge would be larger than a cross stitch one so determined it would be one side of a cushion cover.  I sourced a design I liked and used it to determine the dimensions.  I then purchased the yarn, cushion pad and buttons and set to work.  

Now I am not going to tell you it was straightforward, because it was not.  There were just five colours of yarn to use - white, blue, red, yellow and grey - but the detail in the pattern required multiple colour change points across many rows of the design.  Rather than buying several balls of each colour, I had to separate each colour out into multiple smaller balls so that each detail had its own yarn source.  This avoids having lengths of yarn across the back of the knitting which can get messy and make the finished piece not sit flat.  The downside of this was that across the main part of the badge, I had fifteen balls of yarn in play.  At each colour change, it is necessary to twist the two yarns together to prevent holes in the finished piece.  As you can imagine, this is some feat with so many balls of yarn on the go.  At the end of each row I had to untwist the yarns to free them up for knitting the next.  I am assured by my husband and son that it was quite a spectacle, especially when I got in a tangle with the yarn!  To give you a flavour, one of the rows would have been: white, yellow, blue, red, blue, yellow, white, grey, blue, white, grey, blue, white, grey, blue, white, yellow, blue, red, blue, yellow, white.  That is 21 colour changes.  Now I look back on it, what was I thinking?

It took a couple of weeks of effort, evenings and weekends, to complete but when it was finished, I was relieved to find that it did actually look recognisable as the Chelsea Football Club badge.  I was so pleased.  I grabbed the cushion pad and - bump - back down to earth.  The badge was good and fitted across the square cushion pad beautifully but it was considerably short.  What to do?  I pondered a while.  If you are wondering if there were any exclamations of frustration, I assure you there were but it was just using up time that would be more productively used to solve the problem.  I suspect I still spent a good half hour seething before I set to finding a solution.  Using the completed badge, I worked out how many more rows of knitting I needed. Just knitting a chunk to tag on the bottom would look awful so I decided to make it purposeful by knitting into it the year, 2012, to denote for the chap when he set off on his new adventure. 

Once that was complete, I made the back of the cushion cover, a two tone button up design.  Being single coloured and no variation on the chosen pattern, this was knitted up very quickly by comparison.  I confess to being pleased with how the finished cushion looked.

The chap from work was speechless when presented with the cushion.  He could not believe that I had recalled our throwaway chat about the Chelsea badge and been prompted to make him such a personalised gift.  

I thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of making it but the pleasure in knowing how happy it made him was the greater reward.