koi canvas floor cushion

Rae made me do it.

I immediately fell in love with the big velveteen square floor cushion she posted on Instagram a few months ago, and as luck would have it, she wrote up a great tutorial for making one of my very own!

The cool thing about this cushion is that it’s pretty sizable, but only takes one (albeit entire) yard of fabric. I chose It’s a Plus from the Koi Canvas collection by Rashida Coleman Hale. It’s her final line with Cloud 9 Fabrics and I’m excited to see what she has in store with Cotton+Steel this spring. Her designs are beautiful and the canvas was just right for a cushion like this.

You’ll also need four yards of 6/32″ piping – I was really hoping to find it pre-made, but no luck, I had to do it myself. Not my idea of a good time (I kind of hate it, in fact), but I do think the bigger piping looks nice. If you make your own and use this size piping, I’d recommend cutting your bias strips 1.5″ wide rather than 1.25″ – those ended up too narrow to accommodate my piping cord and still end up with 3/8″ seam allowance. But I already put my 1.25″ bias strips to use on another project, so it’s all okay.

There was a lot of indecision when it came to filling this thing – Rae used fabric scraps to stuff hers, and there’s no shortage of those around here. I wish I were the type of person who could do that without over-thinking it, but I’m a horrible saver of things, and I just couldn’t pull the trigger.

But then we were snowed in for days and I couldn’t get out to buy fiberfill, and that empty shell of a floor cushion was just begging to be stuffed. Or maybe Lila was begging to stuff it, I can’t remember.

So we started filling it, selectively, with fabric scraps. Then we cut up some unused sweatshirt fleece. And some cotton batting. And some poly batting. And then when I thought it was finished, I stuffed it some more. But it still wasn’t full enough (this thing is big!), so my lovely neighbor trekked over in the snow with her batting. Lila helped with the cutting and the stuffing, which made it a great snow day activity…of which we were forced to come up with many over the course of the past five days. Our list included heart shaped anything and everything, more Hidden Pictures than ever thought humanly possible, crying our eyes out watching Charlotte’s Web, and around 236 other things. Snow is exhausting.

Anyway, this cushion is already well loved around here – I half-heartedly tried to sell it as a reading pillow, but there’s nothing she’d rather do than jump from point A to point B, especially when point B is an enormous pillow on the floor, so I think it’ll get more use in that department. And, of course, Oscar just loves anything that Lila loves.

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