3rd Times a Charm!

Well, it took me 3 tries to make my first pillow. Last year when I made Kirsten's afghan, I thought I would make a pillow too. I bought a pillow form and figured I would just crochet a cover. I did, but getting the size right was a challenge (I wasn't following a pattern) and I didn't like how it looked. I figured if I did just single crochets on the back and shells on the front, that would work. NOT!

I then came across a free pattern for a button pillow with buttons on the side. I first thought I would make it with Seahawks buttons or football buttons (I have fabric of footballs!). However, when I was showing it to Margie (Kirsten's step-grandma) she scrunched up her nose at the thought! So, I decided that may not be the way to go.

My first plan with the buttons was to put them on both sides. White as the base and then dark blue button on top of the white button on the light blue stripe, light blue on the the dark stripe. Well, sewing on buttons proved to be about the hardest part of the whole project. Sewing through the yarn and 2 buttons was about all I could handle!

I mentioned this was my 3rd attempt. The first was the single crochet mess. The second was this pattern. I got within 2 rows of having it completed and ran out of dark blue yarn. I also had very little of the light blue. I could not find more of the light blue which I believe was Red Heart Country Blue, but believe it or not, I had NO covers left to tell me for sure. Again, I fell victim to the company not making a color that I did not have enough! (I feel better about buying 15 skeins of the teal for Carmen's afghan now!)

Back to the dark blue issue, I bought a new skein of the "no dye lot" midnight blue. However, it was significantly darker than the left over skein I had. So, I abandoned the project with 2 rows to go.

As I was trying to get items from Kirsten's birthday list, I was not able to purchase the items in the stores, I had to order them online so I was not going to having anything for her to open. Monday (we were celebrating on Wednesday! I decided to start over. This time using the new skein of dark blue. I had to tear out the first attempt to recover the light blue yarn. I also had to keep the number of rows for the light blue the same since I only had the yarn that was in the second attmept!

Believe it or not, I actually got it done -- even with going to the Mariners game on Tuesday night. Needless to say, I crocheted through the entire game! She seemed to like it when she opened it.