I worked on adaptations of rugs from three different areas of Morocco - all within the Atlas Mountains. Now I want to design and stitch a rug completely on my own.

This first original rug will be based on Rabat style rugs that are more traditional rugs found throughout the world - the Oriental style with a medallion in the middle of the rug and borders around all the sides.

Following the steps that I’ve detailed in the pages Adapting Needlepoint - Step by Step, I had to decide what the rug would look like and then work from there.

The first photo on the right is a rough plan of how the rug would look. I decided that I wanted an old world feel, so I chose navy blue and five shades of red for the colors. I started by marking the canvas with the desired size. In this case it will be 18” wide and 32” tall.

Since I will be stitching borders on all sides of the rug, I needed several borders that would not take up too much room and would work together. Since I have had trouble with the canvas showing through on several past projects, I have taken the time to design and practice stitch several borders using only slanted stitches to allow better coverage of the canvas.

The second photo on this page shows the three borders that I have created for this rug. The first is the Fish Skeleton motif, which I needed to stitch from both sides until they met in the middle of the bottom. This motif didn’t come out even, so a little adapting was needed to make the center of the row look good.

The second motif is a new version of the 8-pointed star that I created. I filled in around the stars with cross stitches in a gold color (Silk & Ivory -Curry) and a dark blue (Silk & Ivory - Classic Navy).

Then I added a very thin border that look like a twisted ribbon. This little border will be used as a separator between the borders and the motifs rows and a separator between the borders and the central medallion area.

The third photo shows the two motif bands that were placed at the top and the bottom of the rug - Diamonds and Octagons.

The medallion in the middle of the rug was fun to design and stitch. The little snake border was easy until I got to the ones that had to be stitched on the diagonal. Then I filled in with Classic Navy around the medallion using the Byzantine stitch.

And finally the finished version of the rug. Red isn’t my color, but I love how this one turned out.