Last month, I finally fully finished my first biscornu. The project had been languishing for a long time (several times actually), so I was glad to finally have it done.
And now, I have something to share on the Fully Finished Gallery SAL this month, hosted by Rachel the Ten Hour Stitcher.
The sunflower itself is from a free pattern by Lemon Aida. When I started it in 2022, I was looking for a quick pattern to try to make a biscornu with. I decided I didn't want the borders, and for some reason, I didn't think the leaves from the free pattern would look right on a biscornu, so I decided to make my own leaves.
I had some frustrations with color choice for the leaves, and then I wasn't sure I made the right choice, so stitching was off and on. Despite it's small size, I didn't finish stitching the top until 2023. You can see that I stitched 23 as the year on the bottom.
Then, I had another struggle deciding what color to use to stitch the biscornu together. Typically, biscornus are assembled by stitching a backstitch (or double running stitch) square outline on both the top and bottom pieces, and then whip stitching the two sides together through those stitches. I couldn't decide what color would make sense for this stitching. I even tried not assembling it this way, and stitching with the right sides together and flipping it right side out toward the end, so the thread wouldn't show. However, because the biscornu is small and the edges need to be offset, it was too fiddly to do. After being in timeout for another year, I decided to use the same color as the leaves to assemble the biscornu.
Then, partway through stitching the outline, squirrel happened, and I left this sitting once again. I finally decided last month that it needed to get done. So much for a quick project.
Biscornus are also often cinched together in the middle with a pair of buttons after being sewn together and stuffed. With this one being so small, I didn't particularly want to use buttons. In case you're wondering what I did, I used 2 strands of the same floss as the middle of the sunflower and went from back to front to back to front to back. When I came up on the front, I carefully came out the same holes as the middle cross stitch, in the same order as making a cross stitch. You can barely see it, but there are 2 cross stitches on top of each other in the center - the first was stitched normally as part of the pattern, and the second was stitched with the thread used to cinch the middle of the biscornu. Then, I squished the center and pulled the two ends of the thread tight, tied a knot on the back, and hid the ends.
And here it is with some pins by Lady Dot Creates, which were the reason I wanted to make a sunflower biscornu in the first place.
