Fazia's Hobbies, Crafts, Etc.

I've got a lot of hobbies and interests, from writing to reading, music to traveling. Listed here are some of the handicraft type hobbies I like to do.

Needlework | Tatting | Dolhouses | Model Building/Airbrushing | Painting

Needlework

I love cross stitch, embroidery, crewel, needlepoint, and I'm learning hardanger. I started with crewel when I was about 10 and I've been stitching ever since. Click on the images below for a larger version.

Crewel/Embroidery

yarn stitched mushrooms yarn stitched puppy and flower pot Floss stitched baby raccoon in a tree
My second crewel project, at about age 12. My next crewel project, some years later. This I did at the same time as the puppy, but the project is floss embroidery instead of crewel.

Counted Cross Stitch

Couted Cross stitched cachina doll Counted cross stitched jalapenos tied with raffia counted cross stitched pupy and kitten in love coungted cross stitched witches hat stars and saying best witches counted cross stitched pacific northwest styleized orca
My first counted cross stitch project, about 1994 or so. From a kit, this contains simple lines and large blocks of color. It was a great one to start with and completed fairly quickly. My second CCS project was several years later - July 1999. I picked someting small and simple to get back into the swing of things. This had a little more shading, so I learned some new things. You can see one mistake I made in the upper right hand corner. I promptly picked up another project the following Spring. This is one of my favorites. Larger than the previous two, the colors changed quite a bit, so there was more counting to do. The mat came with the kit. The image is just so sweet. :-) For my best friend Valerie and part of a Halloween stitch-along. This was my first project with fractional stitches in it, and somewhat difficult to do on Aida cloth. I actually started this project in August and gave it to her for her birthday in early September. For my friend Sidra in 2001. This orca, or killer whale, is by artist ****, and is in the style of the First Nation Salish tribe of the Pacific Northwest. I used a program to convert the image to a cross stitch pattern and stitched this in about a month and was my largest work thus far.

I'm currently working on:

Embroidery: A floss embroidered and candlewicking pillow of roses and ivy.
Needlepoint: A fruit and violin still life scene
Counted Cross Stitch: a small fruit basket (finished), and my first project on evenweave (jobelan) - a freebie by Teresa Wentzler.

Tatting

I've just started to learn this rather compact craft. For some reason I've had difficulty in the past picking up knitting and crocheting - something that drives me absolutely NUTS since my mother can BLINK and she's knitted a fancy Scandinavian patterned sweater.

Dollhouses

I'm finishing up one dollhouse roof, then I'm probably going to sell the thing on E-bay. I'ts a four room standard kit-type dollhouse, but I've tired of working on that one for now. I've got my sights set on a lighthouse from RealGoodToys.

Model Building

I also love building plastic scale models. It's still a fairly male-dominated hobby - I don't see a lot of other girls/women in it which is too bad. My favorites are space models, both real and fictional, and my own lunar lander model won a ribbon at a local space festival. I've also been fascinated by diaromas, but I've never built one. It was for painting scale models that I became interested in airbrushing, and I eventually wrote an Airbrush FAQ.

  • IMPS - IPMS (International Plastic Modelers' Society) is an organization dedicated to the fun scale modeling. It was started in Great Britain
    in 1963, as the British Plastic Modelers Society. There are now branches of IPMS all over the world.
  • ScaleModel.net - Lots of info, searchable lists.
  • rec.scale.models - USENET newsgroup about scale models of all types. I used to post here in the early 1990's.
  • A Scale Modeling Course by Bill Zuk.
  • Ship modeling FAQs

Painting

I began with watercolors when I was about 12, and was getting pretty good by the time I was about 15. But I didn't persue painting again for a while until I began watching the PBS series by Bob Ross. That got me all excited again and I tried a few oil paintings in his style. I was rather proud of my very first attempts. It's been a while again, but ow that I have a place where I can keep my easel setup and my supplies out, maybe I'll venture into oils and watercolors again. In the meantime, I do a lot of digital "painting":

Fazia Begum Rizvi // fazia@io.com