Saturday, February 16, 2008

February Colour Challenge


While I have not blogged in nearly two weeks I have not been completely idle. I did finish a crossstitch sampler I started for my granddaughter in 2001! Not exactly a quick worker. I thought it only needed mounting and framing but looking at it recently I decided that the piece itself needed a stitched frame . This was not an original design but a sampler from a Burda Crossstitch Special. While I spent some time stitching three of these samplers about 7 or 8 years ago I find crossstitch repetitive and counting from charts quite difficult nowadays. However I am pleased to have finally completed the last two samplers.

Reporting on the TIF challenge for this month ( there has been some wonderful work reported on so far - I keep resolving to look only at the end of the month but then just can't help myself!) - for the moment I have shelved the theme section of the challenge and decided to use the palette to stitch a biscornu. "Biscornu" is a comparatively new word in my vocabulary. Isn't the Web wonderful! I love that shape and have been meaning to make myself such a pincushion for a little while.

The fabric is 16 count cream Aida and the embroidery will be on two 4 inch squares. Designing embroidery for a purpose, other than a postcard , is something that is new to me. However I am enjoying the challenge.

Once again I am sticking to a very limited palette, just 5 colours of DMC stranded floss. I based my decision on the colours on my computer printout of Sharon's graphic plus the RBG numbers. The final choice was 3778, 3773, 158, 932 and 3752.

Originally I thought I might try to design a suitable crossstitch pattern for this biscornu. However it seemed this might be a good opportunity to use some of my newly acquired PLOS stitches.

As usual the design will evolve as I stitch- I really would like to be able to get it all down on paper first but that just doesn't seem to work very well for me. If I keep trying maybe one day it will happen! Also because I have not made one of these before I can only guess exactly where focus stitches need to be placed. Maybe I need to cut out two paper squares and fingershape them to help.

Not much done so far! However here are the colours and the outline.
A postscript - Why can't I get blogger to put my images where I want them?

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