Woolsack2012 is a project that has really captured my imagination. One focus of it is British wool, and for me that will be very much British sheep breeds.

There is a facebook group, and one of a number of threads on Rav can be found here

My mum died a few years ago, but she would have totally embraced the Woolsack project and loved the idea of some of her knitting ending up being taken home by Olympic athletes from all around the world. When I was growing up we used to sit and watch the Olympics together every 4 years - both sitting and knitting in front of the television.

So I wanted my first Woolsack cushion to involve her memory in some way. I’ve found some British yarn that was in her stash (not that we called it that then!) and I’ve found an old pattern for a sweater that I knitted up for her that she loved wearing. It’s entrelac, so I shall used that technique for this cushion.

THE PATTERN
Tension 22 sts & 30 rows to 10cm/4inches stocking stitch.

I worked out that I’d need 88 stitches for the stocking stitch back - 40cm/16 inches wide.

From the measurements on the pattern I arrived at 56 stitches to get the pattern to be 40cm wide.

A bit of maths and 84 stitches was close enough for the back and worked easily with 56 stitches.

INSTRUCTIONS
Cast on 84 stitches.
Row 1 - {Knit 2 tog, K 1} repeated - this reduces the 84 stitches to 56 and leaves you ready to start the first row of Entrelac on the purl side.

I had units of 8 stitches.
I can’t find a free pattern on Rav, but I’ve googled and finally found this website:
which has what looks to be the same instructions as I’ve been using from my pattern - it’s an old pattern but not old enough to write out the instructions here.

Having 7 base triangles of 8 stitches each is measuring up well to give the right final dimension. You’ll probably need to pin it out to check the right final length. I’ll post how many ‘units’ I knitted to get the right length when I get there.

16 Feb I’ve finished knitting the front - I’d forgotten how much fun it is to knit Entrelac - and now it’s pinned out for blocking.

I’m planning to knit a stocking stitch back for the cushion, possibly doing a Fibonacci sequence of stripes.

18Feb - just blocked the back of the cushion and I’m very pleased with the visual effect of the Fibonacci stripes. Maybe a wondering if the point where the mirror images meet might work better if done differently, but that’s for some fun experimentation (or I might even get my sketch books out of storage!) in future.

For anyone who is interested I used 4 rows between each stripe, and the stripe sequence for one half is 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 rows.

At the mid point I had the 2 ‘background’ 4 rows just meeting.

Number of stitches would depend on individual tensions and how much, if any blocking, anyone wanted to do, but I cast on 80 stitches.

Amount of yarn used:
I don’t know the yardage for this yarn (it’s at least 20 years old when they didn’t give that information on the ball bands) However it’s on the thinner side of the DK spectrum.
The back, which used equal amounts of the cream and brown yarns, weighs a total of 70g.
The front, which used 3 different yarns, cream, brown and the green speckled, weighs a total of 94g.