Thursday, 14 March 2013

Puff Daddy

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I found the perfect chair for the nursery. It is a shape and style that I love, has wood tones that coordinate with the dresser I have for the room, it rocks and it swivels, its exactly what I wanted! Oh, and it was $35 purchased at a second hand store. Score! Full disclosure, it was $35 but then I spilled a ton of dough into having it reupholstered, so technically this is no longer a cheap chair, but it is still perfect. 

With the right chair in the room I then began my search for just the right foot stool/ottoman. I had originally wanted something with storage, the room is tiny and I thought that a double duty piece was a good idea, but I couldn't find anything that I liked. Then one day I saw this blog post and was completely sold on the Puff Daddy Pouf for my room.

I had a few skeins of a "Not Quite Chris Grey" colourway hanging around my office, it's darker and more blue than Chris Grey, but not as dark or as blue as Atlantic. I used 3 strands held together, cast on 40 sts and just knit until I felt like this puppy was large enough. Simple as that. All in all I probably used about 5 full skeins worth of yarn (I broke into 6 skeins since I was holding 3 strands together, but I stopped with about a third of each of the last 3 skeins remaining). Though my pouf is gorgeous, I wouldn't really recommend my Green Label for this project simply because a much less expensive craft yarn would do the trick just as well. Being able to knit this in such a nice yarn is a real luxury.

Chris and I then spent a good evening trying to figure out the best way to stuff it. Not as easy as it seems. I'm still not thrilled with our stuffing job and will likely try again one day down the road. We used a pillow, a bunch of quilt batting, some upholstery foam and a bunch of duct tape to form our pouf shape. I'm happy with the shape, but I blame Chris for being over enthusiastic with the duct tape, it's not as soft and cushy as it should be. But without the tape it was a weird, mis-shaped ball... I wish I had a mini bean bag chair to stuff in there.