Lizard Cult Knitted Pillowcase

Or what if I could show some of my board game love through these pillowcases? And thus, the idea of making a pillowcase dedicated to the Lizard Cult (from Root) was born. I was truly curious how making this pillowcase would go because I did not have anything to go off. I mean, I could have googled it but where it the fun in that. Plus making a tricked-out square should not be that hard.

Because I am using a knitting in the round method, there is a lot of knitting continuously for long stretches of time to make the pillowcase. I call this bulk knitting. And that is how we are going to start off. First, I cast on 140 stitches. This means that 70 stiches are devoted to each side. This turned out to be 20 inches because I could not do the calculations right.

And then I began to knit, and knit, and knit some more! I felt like I was knitting in a continuous   loop. Because I was. My aim was to knit until I had reached 8 inches (this was when I still thought I was working with a 16-inch pillow). Then I could make the back opening for the pillowcase.

I really like having pillowcases when their openings are on the back rather than on one side. I feel like this keeps the pillowcase on better than if it is on the side. So, when I reached the halfway point of knitting the pillow, I stopped and switched tactic.

I knitted 70 stitches onto a straight needle and did a back-and-forth stitch to create the flap. Basically, knitting one row and purling one row. I did this on repeat until I had about two inches of material made for the flap. A part of me wished I had made the flap bigger.

With the flap made, I turned my attention back to the main body of the pillowcase. I was missing half of the stitches that I needed so I cast on 70 stitches. This process was hard for me. Casting on stitches in the middle of a project is not my forte. Definitely something that I want to work on.

Once my stitch count on the circular needles was back up to 140, I was back to knitting at infinitum. This was the point where I realized that the width of my project was a little bigger than I was expecting. Seeing that it was at 20 inches, I decided that the length should match the width.

I ended up doing a lot of knitting. But, after what felt like weeks, I got the project to 20 inches in length. The final bind off was combining the two sides of the pillowcase. I tried to keep the front 70 stitches on one side and the back 70 stitches on the other. Then I put the needle through two stitches and knit them together before binding them off.

With the knitting for the pillowcase finished, it was time to close all the loose ends. First, I ended up addressing the opening in the back. The edges were not attached to anything, so I ended up using the string around the edge to sew the flap to the side. This gave the back more stability.

Then it was time to close the opening at the one end of the pillowcase. This is where I originally started the project. To close the opening, I used a crochet hook to attach the two sides together. This was easy where the yarn was cooperative, which is not always the case.

But all I had at this point was a plain yellow pillowcase. Which honestly could have been a great stopping point. It looked good but I wanted to make it better. And what way to be better than to represent the Lizard Cult?

I grabbed some black yarn and a needle that could handle the yarn and got started. There was a general pattern that I was using but I wanted to make it bigger to handle the size of the pillowcase. And I did this as I was embroidering. Sometimes, I really think that I should have a plan ahead of time.

But the pattern turned out well! I really loved the way that the final pillowcase looked! And below is the pattern I used (made after I did it).