A fair trade...

It's always good to broaden one's horizons a bit, and with that (and my 101 List) in mind, I decided to join my first ever stitched item exchange. (I've been in Secret Stitcher exchanges before, but never have I actually made an item to be sent off.) The item in question is a biscornu - an 8-sided pin-pillow type thing. It's something a little different.

I decided to create my own design for this, since I have been wanting to try my hand at that anyway, but I was at a loss until I found some neat little knotwork buttons at the store. Inspired, and fresh off an Assisi-style finish, I came up with the following:

I'm pretty proud of it, so I've decided to make it available as a freebie. It can be done in any colorway you choose - you just need a medium and a dark shade each of two different colors. I used blue and purple since those are my victim's favorites. It's probably not well-suited to an overdye, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong!

I may have gotten a little ambitious in what I thought I could accomplish in a month, though, and indeed it was the night before final mailing day by the time I'd finished the stitching on it. Fashioning it into a biscornu wasn't as difficult as I'd feared, and the finished result looks like this:

Off into the mail it went! I was very proud of how it turned out.

Until the next day, when I got this lovely biscornu from Annette:

At that point I was feeling a bit insecure about my own, since the one I received was so beautiful.

But Annette seems pretty happy with the one I sent, and I'm thrilled with hers, so all is well. And I had fun, so I may do this again sometime.