More flowers for my sofa garden

Before I made the Sunflower Cushion I featured the other day, I made a rainbow one from this pattern on the utterly fabulous Attic 24.. This site is truly delicious and full of wonderful things to crochet, look at and eat!

So here is my version of Attic 24's rainbow cushion:

I opted to do two rows of petals in each colour, that way I always knew I had crocheted an increase and non increase row behind each round of petals before I started a new colour.

I made this when I was having trouble finding circular cushion pads, so ended up turning the circle into a square once I had finished all my petal rows and I think it turned out really well considering I had to do a bit of maths to work out how to make it into a square and maths was never my strong point at school!

If you want to turn the rainbow cushion into a square then here's what you need to do:

Once you have made your flower to the size you want, do one final round of non increase behind your petals in the colour of wool that you want to make the square part of your cushion.

Take a note of the number of stitches in this last round.  Divide this number by 4, then divide this number by 6.  All mysterious just now, but will make sense soon, I promise!

For my cushion this worked out as

140 divided by 4 = 35, 35 divided by 6 = 5.8 so I called that 6 and that's the number we need to convert our circle into a square.

And why is this number so important, well this will allow us to use stitches along the row to build up the edges and corners like so:

At your starting point chain 3 and 1dc in the same stitch (this will eventually become the edge of your last corner)

For my cushion I then did the following:

1dc in the next 6 stitches, 1hdc in the next 6 stitches, 1sc in the next 12 stitches, 1 hdc in the next 6 stitches, 1dc in the next 6 stitches, then (2dc, ch2, 2dc) in next stitch and there you go a straight edge and corner made.

If your number comes out differently to mine then just substitute the 6 for your number (the 12 singles are because you are doing back to back sets of 6 singles).

Now continue this pattern all the way round finishing with a slip stitch to join to your starting chain.

Once you have this initial row you then just work 1dc in every stitch with the 2dc, ch2, 2dc pattern for the corners and continue until you have the size of square that you need.

At that's how I made my circle a square! Nothing to it really!

And then I found those Ikea cushions so had to make a proper round one, it's much bigger than I thought it would be, but I love it!!

So that's a sunflower, a rainbow and a giant - well I'm not sure what kind of flower this one is (kind of chrysanthemummyish isn't it?!) - all in my sofa garden!