Stitching - Fobs and Things

I have been fairly busy with my stitching in recent weeks. My first completed piece was this mini tapestry hanging.

The design is based on the tile pattern on the roof of a house in Thalwil in Switzerland. I used wool thread on canvass. This time I did not try to copy the design on the building but rather used the patterns to make up my own composition. Also, this time I used a completely different colour scheme as you can see from the original photo I took of the roof.

My other largish piece was the third in a series of Five Easy Pieces, which use Bargello designs to fill in the five sections. This one is predominantly in blues which I used for the four surrounding sections. For the rectangle I used three shades of grey. As usual not sure what I will do with the piece now that it is finished.

Other than these two pieces, most of my time has been taken up with little things - fobs and biscornus. The fobs were done to identify the different colours of the cotton threads I use. Each thread is now kept in its own little plastic wallet. The idea is that all the reds for example can be kept together in their own little box or whatever. The fobs are meant to be attached to these containers, but as yet I have not figured out how to do this. My technical skill is pretty limited. Anyway here are the fobs. The first group is made up of the fobs stitched in traditional Palestinian designs.

The next two fobs were stitched in Bargello patterns.

The final two fobs are a sort of mini samplers of needlework stitches.

Though tiny pieces it was great fun doing them all, and I may repeat the exercise, though perhaps more as just decorative pieces. The other small things I have been working on were mini biscornus. They can be used as fobs to attach to scissors or anything really. I have now completed two of these mini biscornus. For the first I made up my own designs using traditional Palestinian patterns. The following photos show the two sides of the biscornu. This one is still at present unattached.

For the second mini biscornu I used a design from Louison’s blog. She regularly puts up new designs for biscornus on her blog. The designs are in black and white, so you can choose your own colour scheme. I used greens and here are the two sides before the final stitching and filling.

And here is the finished article now attached to my scissors.

As the pattern came from Louison, I sent her some photos of my work and she kindly put them up on her blog. If you are interested in biscornus, then I would strongly recommend her blog, which you can find here. She does more than just biscornus, so it is well worth visiting anyway.

My current project is another biscornu. This time it is a 15 sided biscornu, and again the designs have come from Louison. The stitching is relatively easy. The difficulty comes with the putting it all together. Wish me luck.