The Beat That My Heart Skipped – A blog dedicated to daily design inspirations. By Rohini Wahi.

A few weeks ago I popped into Yalla Yalla, a sweet little Lebanese café in Soho to pick up some lunch. As we waited for our food to take away, we were invited to wait on a bench which was scattered with cushions made from scarves:

Sorry about the rubbish picture (I had to take is surreptitiously on my phone) but I promise, in real life they look great and what’s more they looked really easy to make. I decided to try my own take on it, using this (Indian, I think?) scarf that I picked up for a couple of pounds from the charity shop at the end of my road. The point is you could do this with any old scarf or loose fabric from any far off land to add a bit of an exotic feel to your living room, garden furniture, or even to picnic in style and comfort!

By the way, I stitched mine by hand just to prove how quick and easy it is to do this without any fancy equipment, but of course if you have a sewing machine it might be a little neater. Here goes. Cat x

You will need:

Cushion
Scarf
Needle and thread
Pins
Tape measure
Scissors

Step 1 Wrap the fabric over the cushion and line up the edge (the edge with tassles if you have one) with the seam of the cushion

Step 2 Once it’s lined up, measure 7 inches or so (depending on how bit your cushion is – basically this needs to be about a third the length of your cushion) of extra fabric from the edge of the cushion.

Step 3 Cut off the remaining fabric.

Step 4 Wrap the extra fabric up and over the cushion. This will become the fold that means you can take the cushion out of the cover later on.

Step 5 Now stitch together the two edges of that folded part, but just on the one side.

Step 6 Now pull the rest of the fabric back over the top – exactly as you did in step one, so the tasselled edge is lined up with the bottom of the cushion. Pin the right hand edge of the cushion cover in place, so that it overlaps the stitching you’ve just done with the extra fold of fabric.

Now sew along the whole edge, stitching the front and the back of the cushion cover together

Step 7 You should now have the right hand side of the cover looking finished, and a whole load of extra fabric on the left. So trim off the fabric you don’t need from the left hand side so the remainder just covers the cushion. Now you can take the cushion out from the inside and turn the whole thing inside out.

Step 8 Pin along the opposite side of the cushion cover to the one you already sewed. As with the other side, there should be an extra fold of fabric, but this time we’ll stitch it in place all at once.

Now stitch along the whole edge

Basically, that’s it! all you have to do now it turn it the right way in. As you can see, the extra fold of material is there so that when you put the cushion back in it can sit inside the fold with no need for a zip or buttons.