As a child, I moved house a lot. To this day, I am equally impressed by and thankful to my parents for somehow managing to make each new place feel homely and familiar. Looking back now, I realise it wasn’t the big things like adding furniture or painting walls that made the house feel like a home. It was the personal things that carried sentimental value.

The Bessy cushion is lovingly named after Bessy Bus (my mother-in-law’s campervan) and all of the precious little homely features that she has gained over the years. When I first released the pattern in issue 195 of Knit Now magazine, it included just the bunting motif in a nod to Bessy Bus’s very own handmade bunting. Since then, it has been expanded to include two more motifs; cute little fluffy sheep and, as a fun festive option (ideal for your advent calendar mini skeins!), rows of stockings.

The cushion cover has a super simple construction - worked in the round, without shaping, and seamed together at the top and bottom once complete, with the option of adding a zip closure if you wish.

Yarn requirements
This pattern is designed to use fingering weight yarn.

Each cushion incorporates a main colour, a repeated contrast colour (eg stocking cuff), and a variable contrast colour (eg stocking foot). Changing the variable contrast colour for each pattern repeat is a perfect way of using mini skeins and leftovers, but the cushion also looks great if you use the same colour throughout.

MC: 50 (125) g / 200 (500) m
Rep CC: 15 (35) g / 60 (140) m
Var CC: 3 (5) g / 12 (20) m per pattern rep OR 25 (65) g / 100 (260) m total