One of my favourite fellow Bay Area Sewists, the lovely Rebecca, challenged me to a microbe-making summer quest, inspired by this post. You can buy those patterns from Etsy, but I wanted to explore making some more in the same vein as my beautiful E. coli.

For my first one, I decided to pick a parasite:

This little beastie is Giardia lamblia, the picture above is actually of it in trophozoite form, but in the laboratory it more common to see it as a cyst, like so:

….but I wanted to do the trophozoite form, and give it some free moving flagella.

To begin, I sketched out the picture on graph paper, (If you don’t have any graph paper, you can print some for free here), then started to make it into a cross stitch pattern by ‘pixelating’ the picture, using whole squares and diagonal half-squares to form the shape.

Colourwise, I picked 5 shades of a lilac colour, so that I could mimic the original stained image, DMC 3747, 340, 155, 3746, and 333.

The main image is just simple cross stitch, with the flagella stitched in holbein stitch (just a variation on backstitch).

On the back I stitched a circle of felt, as usual, but instead of having it with the closure at the top so I could mount on the wall like my birds, I mounted it in the hoop with the closure at the base, then put a piece of dowel between the metal prongs to have it free-standing:

Note: if you change your mind, you can always undo the closure and move it to the top… I think. Once the fabric is pulled taut and closed off with felt it should be pretty stable and allow you to move the hoop.

First challenge completed!