First, let me show off my reupholstered stool. Before on the left in all its orange glory, after on the right, now pale turquoise to match the decor.
The wood has had four coats of a dark-coloured wax. It’s nothing like as dark as the mahogany furniture in that room, or the varnish that was on it before, but I chickened out of applying a stain in case I didn’t like the resulting colour and couldn’t remove it.
First ever upholstery job completed, I’m seriously considering tackling the early 20th Century chair behind it in the photos, which has a pincushion seat as well as an upholstered back panel. But I haven’t even checked whether there’s enough of the bargain velvet left yet, I didn’t realise at first that the back panel has to be double sided because you see it from behind the chair as well as in front. I’ve borrowed a book on traditional upholstery from the library and I’m studying it while I decide what to do.
Mini patchwork
While working on the stool I noticed that my pincushion has seen better days. I must have made it 15-20 years ago and it’s getting very threadbare. Time for a replacement.
I Googled “pincushion projects” and flicked through the photos until my eye fell on a patchwork one called Granny’s Pins. It’s made of small squares – how hard could that be? When I was making face masks for local care homes and domiciliary care providers in 2020 I kept a few of the resulting small scraps of cotton fabric, the ones that were so pretty I couldn’t bear to throw them away. The squares needed for this pincushion are only 1½”x1½”, small enough to be able to cut several from even tiny pieces of fabric.
Of course, what I failed to consider in my haste to make a pretty-but-thrifty pincushion was, the smaller the patchwork pieces, the more accurately they need to be cut and stitched. A 3mm (1/8”) error in the seam joining two large pieces isn’t going to be nearly as obvious as when the finished size of each piece is meant to be a 1” square. But being an inexperienced patchworker, this didn’t occur to me until I compared squares I’d cut from different fabrics and found they were by no means all exactly the same size.
I was put off patchwork as a child by being made to do traditional English hexagonal patchwork at school. Each fabric hexagon first had to have its 6 seam allowances folded over the edges of a smaller paper hexagon, and tacked in place through the paper. Then the pieces were laboriously assembled by slip-stitching the edges together by hand, before removing the tacking and the paper hexagons at the end and stitching the whole thing onto a backing. The biggest thing I ever made was a teapot stand and I hated the whole fiddly, long-winded process.
It wasn’t until I was in my 30s that I discovered that patchwork doesn’t have to be like that. As is my wont, I leapt in with both feet and pieced together a large quilt as my first machine-made patchwork project. Piecing it was fine, but I hadn’t thought about how I was going to quilt it. That was nearly 30 years ago and I still haven’t finished it. It was going to be a lockdown project but I never got around to it. One of these days …
With the pincushion I’ve gone to the opposite extreme – too small to be sensible rather than too big. But at least it doesn’t have to be quilted.
To make this mini-patchwork I used two things that I’ve had for years and never before had the need for. Firstly, this quilter’s ruler that I bought in the much-missed Bonds haberdashery on a whim. I knew that they were normally quite expensive so I snapped this one up when I saw it, I think it cost me £1. It’s not the most sophisticated quilting ruler, but it’s got a ¼” grid marked on it, which is all you really need. Once I’d remembered that I had it somewhere, and had then found it and put it to use with a cutting mat and roller cutter, my 1½” squares were a lot more accurate.
The second item is a ¼” patchwork foot for my sewing machine. As I started to use it, I gradually realised how all the marks on it can be used to stitch perfect ¼” seams that start and stop in the right places. It makes piecing patchwork quite pleasurable.
It seems that patchwork has not yet gone metric, which is fine by me. I usually sew in inches because the numbers are smaller and therefore easier to remember.
My pincushion is now stuffed and ready for use. In fact, I made a second one to use up all the extra squares I ended up with. I’ve filled them with ground walnut shells, which are apparently ideal for pincushions because they are just gritty enough to keep the pins clean and also ever so slightly lubricating, which prevents rust. We have an abundance of them because my dear husband bought a few kilos to use for sandblasting – if you can call it sandblasting when it doesn’t involve sand. Walnut shells are less aggressive than sand or emery, and were supposed to get our stainless steel saucepans clean without damaging the polished finish. They didn’t, the pans are as black as ever on the outside after 40 years of use. We gave some of the ground shells to a friend to use as stuffing for a draught excluder – they are reassuringly heavy – but there are still plenty left for pincushions.