Half a bellpull

Regular blog readers will know that I love really big embroidery projects, and one of my favourite formats is the bellpull – that is, a long, narrow panel with lots of designs on it. I've done a lot of those in the past, most involving birds of some kind, and at the moment I'm in the middle of yet another bird bellpull. But this one is heavily influenced by all the folk art I've been doing recently, so although the birds started out as crows, they somehow got more and more colourful as they went on

When it's finished, this bellpull will have a tower of seven birds on it, all standing on the back of the bird below, but so far I've only managed to stitch out four. But you can still get a rough idea of what the finished bellpull will look like. It will be about 7 inches (18 cm) wide and 30 inches (76 cm) long, and the colours of the birds will shade from green on the bottom, through blue, red and then yellow at the top

Three crows out of seven

Of course at the moment the project is only part finished, so the whole thing is badly wrinkled, and if you look closely you can see the lines of alignment stitching that enable me to line up all the birds in the right place. All this will of course be sorted out when the whole thing is finished, but meanwhile you can get a general idea of what it's going to look like