WIP: felted loops pillow

I saw this pillow in the lion brand catalog and immediately fell in love. “I must make it,” I thought, and promptly pinned it to my things I want to make board on Pinterest. Well, turns out, easier said than done….waaaayyyy easier said than done. This has turned out to be quite the process. I’ll bring you up to speed with my felted loops pillow process. The pattern is free on Lion Brand Yarn’s website, you just have to sign in with a free account to access it.

I loved that pillow in the picture so much that I opted not to alter at all. I got the exact yarn it called for, color and everything. It calls for three skeins…not a lie, you need all three.

The back of the pillow is pretty simple, just two solid knit pieces.  I did those by hand no problem and continued on. However, the next step says to knit 5 strips at 6 yards each (yup, 6 yards…18 honkin’ feet each) Each strip is only 6 stitches wide. When I started I felt like all I was doing was turning and turning and turning and my first 18-foot-long strip was barely getting there.

Ugh. There had to be a better way.

And sure enough, there was.

When I moved out of my parents’ house. My bedroom turned into the “ultimate craft room” complete with tons of yarn and two knitting machines. (how perfectly amazing is that?! My room, in my absence, is reincarnated into a knitting shrine…totally meant to be.)

My craft extravaganza a few weeks ago with all the projects I highlighted was mainly for two reasons, the knit berry hat baby gift, and to make 30 yards of yarn rope for this project.

So, Saturday morning, I wake up and my mom is starting to set up the knitting machine to get this yarn rope started. By the time I’m out of the shower and ready to go, I see this on the floor:

Holy cow, so much yarn-rope, so little time! And trust me, I’m not very high maintenance…I didn’t even wash my hair that day… this rope was made uber-fast.

Throughout the weekend we did shifts of 500+ rows of yarn rope…you can work up a sweat moving that knitting carriage back and forth! I thought I was going to be sore the next day…I was (very) relieved that I wasn’t. Come Sunday morning, we had this massive pile o’yarn:

Total tally: 92 feet! I came home after the weekend boasting to Brandon all of our accomplishments and showed off this tangled mess of yarn. I don’t think he felt the same sense of satisfaction…

Next step, pin the yarn into loops on a foam board.

The first time (and second, and third) I just winged it. I tried to guesstimate how big the loops should be, but then get half way through and realize that there was no way I’d have enough to get to the end.

So then I got smart. I drew a grid on the board, 13 x 13, so I could pin the loops at all the intersections.

Because I’m an archi-nerd, and I know my archi-friends reading this thought the same thing when they saw that photo, I have to bring up the similarity to Superstudio’s Continuous Monument project…however I highly doubt the idea for this project stemmed from a knitting project…

Yup, that’s an architecture project.

I digress.

I also divided the 92 feet into 13 equal segments and marked each row with a pin so I would know how much rope I could use per row of loops.

***If you decide to venture into making this project, make sure you do this from the start…it will save you time!

All pinned and ready to sew together!

The next step is sew all the loops together.

My strategy was to sew every individual loop together and then a “lattice” strategy of sewing the rows together.

Whew! Finally all sewn together. It’s time to felt! I was super nervous to do that after all this work! Tossing it into the washing machine just seems so daunting and permanent. There’s no going back once you add some hot water and detergent!

Needless to say I had a slight “felt freakout” before putting it in the washing machine.

What happens next?! Talk about a cliffhanger! I guess you’ll just have to come back to find out how the pillow turns out! Be sure to subscribe (if you haven’t already) to not miss out on the action!