Beginning Japanese Embroidery

I have finally (almost) worked up the nerve to try my first Japanese embroidery project. Ordinarily, I'm not this nervous when it comes to needlework. I've done a ton of it, and I have been self-taught almost the entire time, and it's always worked out fine. But Japanese embroidery is different. It involves special techniques that have been handed down from teacher to student for a thousand years. It's worked on beautiful silk fabric with tricky-to-handle silk threads and special tools. Everyone says you must have a teacher. This isn't just something you can do on your own, not if you want to do it right.

And a teacher, sitting beside me, guiding me through the process, and demonstrating all the correct techniques, sounds fantastic. I would really, really like to do that. But we're in the middle of a pandemic here, and it's simply not an option. While there are people attempting to teach Japanese embroidery over Zoom now, I haven't been able to find one who is taking on new students who will be decidedly out of their area once this pandemic is finally over. (If you know of one, by all means, please let me know in the comments!)

So my options are to not do it (at least not for quite a while), or to try it on my own. And I've never been one to simply give up on a dream because all the stars weren't aligning in my favor. Let's be real: I don't think all the stars have ever aligned in my favor like that, for any dream I've had. I've always had to work for it, get help when and where I could, but mostly struggle along on my own until I figured it out.

And anyway, what's the worst that can happen? I make a mistake? The finished piece isn't perfect? That's okay. I doubt I have ever achieved perfection at anything and it's not really even a goal for me. I think perfection is overrated and frankly unnecessary. For me, it's all about improvement. If I'm better today than I was yesterday, if I've learned something, if I'm developing new skills and talents, then that's good enough for me. 

So I will do what I did for my whitework sampler. I will do my best. I will use whatever resources I have (Facebook groups, Japanese embroidery books, the internet) to get whatever help I can. And then I will just figure out the rest on my own. And someday, when this is all over, I'll find a real teacher to help me improve on what I've learned.

But for now, no fear! (Well, a little fear, but I'm not gonna let that stop me.)

So the first step was setting up my Japanese embroidery frame the proper way for Japanese embroidery. The piece of silk I'm using is fairly small — about 7" x 8 1/2" — because the actual project is only about 5" by 6 1/2". I'm using the Step 1 Spring kit by Midori Matsushima.

Because the silk isn't large enough to put on the frame by itself, I needed to use a muslin surround for it. So I cut a large piece of muslin, ironed the whole thing, and then turned the long edges under and pressed them. Once that was done, it was time to frame it. I put the ends into the split dowels and tensioned in the warp direction just a bit. And then I started sewing the other edges to the warp bars:

This is a little different from sewing fabric to a slate frame. You always go 1.) down through the hole in the warp bar, 2.) up through the fabric, 3.) down through the fabric, and 4. down through the next hole. So for step 2, you have to slip the needle between the frame and fabric so that it can go up through the fabric. And for step 4, you have to slip the needle between the frame and fabric again so it can go down through the next hole. Also, the thread can't go straight from the hole to the fabric. It needs to go at an angle. So the stitch on the fabric is always between the two holes. Hopefully you can see this from the picture above.

But I still knotted it off in the same way I would a slate frame. This is what it looked like once both edges were sewn:

I didn't worry too much about getting the sewn edges super tight because this frame has those lovely nuts that will tension it beautifully at the end (they really are so easy to use and I couldn't be happier with this frame). I just wanted enough tension to allow me to attach the silk fairly smoothly:

I did this similar to how I did it for my goldwork project, which was also done on silk. But this time, I did the herringbone stitch entirely on the silk fabric instead of partly on the silk and partly on the muslin. (You'll notice my herringbone stitch isn't even — that's intentional; it helps keep the silk threads from separating if the stitches are all at different spots.) The reason I did this stitching all on the silk was to give the connection extra strength. For Japanese embroidery, you don't stitch through the silk and the muslin like you do for goldwork; you cut out the center of the muslin backing and just stitch through the silk. 

So once the entire silk piece was securely stitched down, I loosened the tension on all four sides, flipped the frame over, tugged up a bit of the muslin, and carefully snipped it. From there, I very carefully cut out the muslin behind the silk:

I had some concerns about how well this would hold once I tensioned it, but I need not have worried. It tensioned beautifully:

This whole process took about 2 hours, which is less time than it takes to set up a slate frame since you don't have to sew on the webbing. From there, I took a break for a couple of days. I needed to prepare mentally for transferring the pattern. The kit advises using Chaco paper (included in the kit), which is kind of a waxy blue carbon paper. I was nervous about this because I've never used this transfer method before, but after consulting a few people in my FB group (Mary Corbet's Needle'n'Thread one) and getting some excellent tips, I moved forward with the process.

I should have gotten a photo of this part, but I didn't because I was trying to transfer the pattern the Japanese embroidery way — in a sort of Zen mindset, free from distractions. Japanese embroidery is called nuido in Japan, which basically means "the way of embroidery." And part of that "way" is the meditative aspect of the work. Nuido teachers recommend being in a tidy, peaceful setting; being clean and free from oils, dirt, and makeup (to keep the fabric and threads clean); and eliminating distractions such as television,conversation, loud or disruptive music, and food (again, to keep the fabric clean).

So I tidied up my apartment, set up my Japanese embroidery frame on the table, and played my Japanese Embroidery playlist (a soothing instrumental compilation of the Memoirs of a Geisha soundtrack and various Zen/meditative songs). 

From my many hundreds of books, I found one the perfect thickness to fit between the frame and the table (The Impossible Art of Being Female, in case you were wondering) and support the fabric during the transfer. Then I laid the Chaco paper (trimmed to the pattern size) onto my fabric, waxy side down. I had to do a test run on the muslin to figure out which side was the waxy side. I thought it was the side with a slightly white sheen to it. Nope. It's the other side. The intense blue side that feels just a tiny bit tacky to the touch.

Then I pinned my pattern onto the silk over the Chaco paper. I only pinned the top and left sides — just enough to keep it from making any dramatic shifts — because I found the vellum had a tendency to buckle if it was pinned down more than that. I just couldn't get it to lie flat with more pins.

And then I carefully (and somewhat tediously) traced over the design with a ball point pen (that had run out of ink). I tried to stay relaxed and Zen-like during this process (as recommended by some ladies on my FB group), but I'm not sure I achieved it. 

Transferring patterns has always been my least favorite part of embroidery, and I found this transfer particularly nerve-racking because I was worried I wouldn't press hard enough. Spoiler alert: I did. I also pressed kind of hard on the vellum to keep it from shifting because it didn't seem that stable even with the pins. Additionally, the silk in the kit has ridges in it, which didn't allow the pen to move easily in certain directions. I kept getting unintentional jogs in my lines when I hit one of these ridges. So there was a lot of tension in me while I tried to get an accurate trace. 

But when I finally took away the pattern and Chaco paper, there was my design:

The sheen in the silk makes it hard to see the blue lines clearly, but I couldn't seem to get a better photograph of it. Rest assured, though, it's very clear in real life. There were a few light blue smudges where my hand or fingers had rested, but I was able to dab these away with a damp Q-tip. I also missed two petals on one flower, but by lining the pattern up over the rest of the flower and sliding the Chaco paper underneath where the missing petals were supposed to be, I was able to transfer them in fairly well.

Overall, it looks pretty good. It's not perfect, but I never expected it to be, and I wasn't aiming for that anyway. It's sufficiently clear to allow me figure out where I'm supposed to be stitching, and that's all I really need from it.

That done, I moved the whole frame to my two TV trays, which I'm using as trestles. (I can't afford real trestles right now; I've spent too much on frames recently.) And then I lined up all my materials for the project:

It's all ready for my first stitching session. But after cleaning my apartment and transferring the pattern, I was exhausted. So I'm leaving the first stitch to another day, when I'm in the right mindset for the way of Japanese embroidery.