Cross-stitch Evil Eye and Greek Key French Hair barrettes

One of the issues of having perma-straight hair is that you can’t do much with it in terms of styling without using enough hair products to mohawk a horse. Because of this, I’ve developed a taste for wearing French hair barrettes. My fascination with the variety of these that I can wear for any occasion also led me to being rather enthusiastic in making my own.

Due to my love of classical history, I couldn’t resist creating these from my cross stitch kit, pieces of felt, and my trusty hot glue gun. As usual, I used a little nail varnish on the backs to make the threads stay in place. The felt was cut as 2 identical pieces that were glued together as it makes them stiffer in order to make a decent barrette back/base. All these were then glued on top of the metal French barrette base.

I thought it would be pretty nice to try a Greek-key design, but in black instead of the traditional blue….

Ever since I was little, I’ve always been fascinated by the design of the evil eye, when I saw my neighbor wearing one on a pin that she had gotten on a family holiday to turkey. This led into my experimentation with all the ways that you could use this design as a decorative symbol…

DIY Recipe - Chickpea Mushroom Egg Mayonnaise Brinner

It’s such a long time back, but the first time that I heard of the term “Brinner” was on the Scrubs episode My Bad Too during which Turk decides to take advantage of the fact that he has secretly learnt Spanish in order to get Carla to make him breakfast for dinner.

Based on the basic idea of using the ingredients that you would use to make a continental breakfast in a recipe for another meal, I came up with this concoction from various things that I found in my cupboards (bought cheap-ish courtesy of my local ALDI).