I saw this pattern and absolutely loved it immediately. It was only after I made it and showed it to friends that I realised that my design tastes appear to have been stolen from an old lady. I’ve stuck to my guns, however, and this (still unfinished) cushion has pride of place on my knackered old green chesterfield (see what I mean about the old lady tastes). Still, I must still have some doubts about its design merits, because I bought two cushions to cover and not only have I not made the second one, I’ve not even finished this one off properly.

This was actually the first non-Granny Square-based thing I made. Until then, I’d only ever known how to create trebles and double trebles, and I only ever picked up my crochet hook (pinched from my mother’s collection) sporadically, usually to start a large blanket that would invariably be abandoned by the third square (ah, the folly of youth).

Since I was (and still am) a bit of an amateur at this sort of thing, I went online to learn how to do the basic double crochet stitches. Problem is, when I then made the thing, nothing quite looked right. Being a slow learner, it took me until I’d finished the first side to realise that the Americans have changed the names of all the stitches, so I was doing trebles instead of double crochets and double crochets instead of single crochets (oh, the larks!).

Being both lazy and stingey, I decided not to waste time and wool unpicking the whole thing, but simply made the other side correctly (which you see here now) and added a few extra rows to the edges to get them to meet. Incidentally, the guage was totally wrong for the smaller UK sizes – it would never have worked out the right size even if I had followed it correctly. So the extra rows would have been in regardless. Incidentally (mark II), you can quite clearly see that the lazy crocheter has used the older US large central yellow bit for the right-hand blue flower. Louisa Calder wouldn’t mind…