My DIY Knitted Pouf

Mr. Ranney Knits has been off on a fabulous European vacation for the past few weeks (I’m not jealous) and that means I’ve been doing all the projects! First up was a good spring cleaning of our apartment. Neither one of us is very tidy (re: we are just as messy as we were as teenagers) so I had my work cut out for me. Don’t worry, I wasn’t slaving away while he was galavanting around Italy, because I quickly got distracted by more knitty things!

I washed all our bedding including the mattress cover that drives me nuts because it never seems to want to stay in place on the bed. When I took it out of the dryer I saw that the polyfil padding had fluffed up, so now I had a lumpy

mattress pad that still wanted to slide all over my bed. I tried laying on it for about 5 minutes before I decided it just wasn’t going to fly with me. Not a big deal, I ordered a new one (is it sad that super quick Amazon delivery is one of my favorite things about living in the city?) but now what to do with the old mattress cover?

It seemed like a waste to throw it away, so I started thinking up ways to turn it into something useful. I’ve been wanting to make a knit floor pouf (poof? puff? ottoman? I’ve seen it referred to as all of the above, I don’t know which is right) for a while, but I was put off by how expensive it is to fill those things. I’ve seen them made with bean bag chairs, folded up blankets, or just straight stuffing it with a ton of fiber filling, but I didn’t want to buy any of those things just to make a little poof. But now I had all this glorious fluffy filling hanging out in my living room!

My original idea was to cut open the cover and salvage the filling, but then I realized I could just roll it up and it would be about the right size and shape for my pouf. I had a piece of felt rug pad (the kind that goes under rugs to keep them from sliding around) that I wrapped around the rolled up cover to help it keep its shape. The slight stickiness of the rug pad made it perfect for holding the mattress cover together and smoothing out some of the lumps.

And finally I got to knit! I followed this tutorial from Flax & Twine which is based on the Puff Daddy pattern by Anna & Heidi Pickles. I used size 15 needles and two skeins of Lion Brand Wool Ease Chunky held together with one skein of Caron Victorian Christmas Gold (so I was knitting with three strands of yarn). I cast on 42 stitches and knit in garter stitch until I could stretch the knitted fabric around my mattress cover. My rolled up mattress cover was about 50” around, so I knit a bit less than that (about 40”) so it would really stretch tight around, which for me was 52 garter ridges. I ended up using four skeins of the Wool Ease Chunky and about two thirds of the Caron.

When I stretched my knit fabric around the mattress cover, the grey of the rug pad showed through, so I covered it up with some white fabric. I then seamed the two ends of my knitting together to make a cylinder, and pulled it over the mattress cover. One of the project pages in Ravelry said this step was like putting on a pair of Spanx, and she was on point. But this is necessary as the tightness of the fabric helps hold everything in and smooth out lumps (much like Spanx).

I seamed the bottom together by picking up every other stitch on the very edge of the fabric. I did the same thing for the top, but I didn’t pull it as tight as I could, when I did that the fabric bunched up a little more than I would like. At this point I decided I didn’t like how lumpy the top of my rolled up mattress cover was, so I stuck a folded up flat sheet on top to smooth it out.

And now I had a hole in the top that needed covering. I used the same Caron Victorian Christmas Gold yarn and knit the Almost Lost Washcloth pattern by Julie Tarsha, then stitched it on to the pouf right over the hole.

I love this as a footstool, but I have to say it isn’t the most stable thing. Maybe if I had added something to make the bottom flat and heavier it wouldn’t be so unsteady. As is, I wouldn’t try to balance my cup of tea on it.