Bargello Update - October 2011

My recent stitching work started and ended with something completely different.  Though most of my work continues to be various forms of Bargello, these two funnily enough were not.  The first was a Zigouigoui or two Zigouigouis to be precise.  I had never come across or even heard of such a thing before, but found them in Louison's ever interesting Biscornu blog.  A Zigouigoui is apparently a very small cushion and some stitchers had used Louison's biscornu designs to make a Zigouigoui.  So I decided to join them and used grilles 99 and 104.  Here are the completed pieces.

 The fabric is 19ct Aida in Christmas red and one zigouigoui is in emerald green and the other in electric blue.  Both use two strands of DMC cotton thread.  The now hang by our fireplace.


For my next project I finally managed to use up just about all of my stash of wool threads.  The design comes from Bargello Magic by Pauline Fisher and Anabel Lasker.  It is No 5 in a series called Fused Diamonds.  It is quite large for me - 38cmx46cm.  This is what it looks like.

The fabric is an antique double canvas and the colours were just what was left in my stash.


Next up was another Bargello design - Petals from The Bargello Book by Frances Salter.  The fabric is 18ct Aida in pale green and the threads are two strands of DMC cotton.  So far I have completed two pieces in this design.

The first was in violet and lavender and the second in shades of blue.  I  intend to do one more of this design in another colour scheme.  The idea is to hang them together in a vertical frame.


While in Switzerland I gave away some of my work - I am running out of space to keep them all.  Emma's friends and in-laws are the happy recipients.  I brought out some other examples of my work just for show and some of her friends were quite keen to get their own version of some of them.  It's always nice to make something for somebody, especially if it's someone you know.  So I now have to stitch three versions of No 5 in the Five Easy Pieces series.  They all wanted the same colour scheme.  Here is the first one.

Arlene wanted design No 3 from the same series, but in a different colour scheme, which made it a bit more interesting for me.  I have now completed this in reds and plums.

I need to get the remaining two pieces finished before Christmas as Emma is due to take them back with her after her holiday here.


The final piece I have just completed is a first for me and pretty much my own design.  I say pretty much as the basic pattern is an example of a Fractal.  Emma's brother-in-law, Luca, introduced me to the world of fractals.  I won't even try to explain what a fractal is, but if you google some images you will discover a weird and wonderful world out there.  Anyway, I used a particular fractal as the basis for this particular project.  It is an octomino and this is the basic shape, which as you can see is made up of eight squares - hence the name.

This octomino can then be used to make up what is known as Brigid's octomino similarity tiling.  

Basically eight octominos combine to form a bigger octomino which in turn combine to make an even bigger octomino.  The process can go on indefinitely, though you do end up with an awful lot of octominos.  The one above has 64 of them.  The next in the series has 512!


I chose the one with 64 octominos for my design.  To get a good contrast I used a bright Christmas red 18ct Aida fabric.  To highlight the octominos I used two colour schemes.  Blues for the outer octominos and greens for the inner ones.  Here is what it looks like.

Each square of the octomino is a Scotch stitch over two intersections.  I will experiment further with this pattern - different stitches, different colours and any other variations I can come up with.


I close this post with a photo of an earlier piece which I stitched for Emma.  It has a centre in Ripples surrounded by Hungarian stitch in yellow and orange.  Unfortunately the photo doesn't clearly show the colours in the centre - they are white, brown and green.  It is now finished and sits in the middle of a fabric I found in a fabric shop.  A simple alternative to framing.  Good stitching to one and all.