My old yoga eye pillow was stuffed with flax. I didn’t actually know this until the mice found it, at which point I needed a new one. I’d been planning to buy another, but happily it occurred to me to do a Ravelry search instead. I couldn’t resist the beautiful cabled calligraphy on this pillow.

I had two skein ends of this yarn left over from my Flower Child sweater, and I imagined that the wool/silk blend would feel lovely on my face, which it does. I didn’t like the idea of purling the entire pillow, so after a false start I decided to cast on 24 stitches for each side instead of 22, knit the edge stitches on the front and purl the rest (or follow the cable chart), and knit along the entire back. This made a neater side than switching from knit to purl and vice versa in between the halves of the magic loop.

This pattern makes for excellent practice in reading cable charts. There are a couple of rows right at the middle where you have to just follow the chart and have faith that everything is going to work out, but the rest of the time you can see exactly how the cables are forming the calligraphic shapes.

To make the opening neat, I started with one round of purling for a garter ridge on the back, and I grafted the closed end from the back side as though I were grafting garter stitch, which put knits on the knit side and purls on the purl side. I’m very pleased with the result.

I sewed the interior pillow from fabric recycled from old clothes and filled it with rice, lavender, and the contents of a chamomile/citrus tea bag.

In the room where I take my yoga classes, there are boxes for students to leave their eye pillows between classes. Since I like to use one at home and I had plenty of yarn left, I decided to make another so I wouldn’t accidentally leave my pillow behind. Always good to have less to worry about when you’re practicing yoga.

UPDATE: One of the pillows won a blue ribbon at the 2011 St. Mary’s County Fair. I was amused to see that in the post-judging display, the pillow was laid out cable-side down. I know it can be hard to tell the front from the back with knitting sometimes, but seriously…