Japanese Cherry Blossoms

I finally gathered up the courage to do my first stitches using silk thread on my Japanese embroidery project. I was pretty tentative, but since the kit just said to use stem stitch and satin stitch, which I've done with regular cotton floss, I turned on my Japanese embroidery playlist and decided to give it a go:

I didn't think it looked too bad, all things considered, so I posted it on my Needle'nThread FB group to see what the Japanese embroiderers out there thought. And right away, I got a bunch of tips about what to do differently. One helpful person told me the little bud should actually be stitched more like a square with one shorter stitch on each end. By doing it that way, it will read more like a circle than if I try to actually stitch a circle. Another person told me that my satin stitch leaf was pretty even, but the angle of the stitches should be 45 degrees from the center line of the leaf to give it a more elegant look. 

I decided not to redo them because I like to compare my first attempts with later attempts to see how I'm progressing. And this pattern includes plenty of leaves and buds to practice on, so I committed these suggestions to memory and kept going. Next up was my first cherry blossom — a pretty ubiquitous theme in Japanese embroidery:

I didn't think it looked too bad personally. So I decided to post this one on the Intro to Japanese Embroidery FB group I had just joined. One of the admins helpfully PMed me and told me the petals of the blossom should be fuller and the thread at each tip should extend out a little further. A few other people told me to go beyond the stitch line rather than right on the stitch line. And everyone and their dog noticed my teeny tiny puckers and told me to tension my frame more tightly. So I did tension it a bit more tightly.

At this point, I got several suggestions to find a teacher, as it would make it all much easier on me. So I emailed the one teacher I had contact with to see if she'd consider teaching me online, and she said she would, but she would need to figure out a Zoom or Zoom-like solution first. So the teaching thing is still on hold. Fingers crossed I can get that worked out in the near future.

But for now, I decided to keep going. I did some new leaves using the tips I was given, and I used my first metallic thread for this project:

The leaves definitely look better — particularly the one on the left. The 45-degree angle really does make a difference, but I still need a bit more practice. It's hard to keep that angle and go just beyond the pattern line. I don't know why I struggle with that so much, but I do. The silver metallic thread went fine on the stem stitch lines, but then I decided to try two buds with it as well, since the kit said to use my imagination.

Right away a problem crept up. The blue carbon lines stuck to the metal thread and turned it a slightly blue color. I don't know if you can see it in this picture, but there's definitely a blue tint to some of the silver (I discovered months later that this particular silver thread was rainbow silver thread and naturally had tints of pink and blue in it):

I didn't love it, regardless of the blue tint, so I ended up taking out the metal thread on the buds entirely. I redid them in the pink silk, trying to do more of a square with shorter ends, as I'd been advised:

I definitely prefer the pink silk. And the tip worked great. They look much rounder when they're stitched as more of a square, though I still need a bit of practice.

And then I tried one more cherry blossom as well, keeping in mind the tips the FB group admin gave me and carefully watching the video she sent to try to grasp the technique a little better:

You can see that the new blossom, while still far from perfect, is much fuller, with more defined points. I think it looks a lot better, and I'm happy to see that I'm making progress. This probably would be much easier with a dedicated tutor, but I'm finding that lots of people are willing to give me helpful tips, and as I incorporate them, I'm seeing a decided improvement in my work. So I think I'll keep going as I am for now and hope the tutor thing will work out soon.

But I will say this: flat silk is really tricky to work with. The little individual filaments in a strand of flat silk want to fly around in all different directions unless you keep the strand under constant tension. And it snags on every darn thing imaginable — the wooden frame, my fingernail, the muslin that the silk is stretched on. Nothing is smooth enough to keep this stuff from snagging. I've been scrubbing my hands with sugar scrub every day to try to get them a little smoother, but since I have to do my own dishes, my hands are just never going to be as silky smooth as the flat silk would like them to be.

But I used a tip I'd read somewhere and ran the strand across my my clean, makeup-free forehead to let the natural oils in my skin help smooth it back together, and that did help. (Confession: my forehead is always makeup free as I'm a big proponent of the no makeup movement. Let your faces be seen, ladies! If it's good enough for men, it's good enough for us.)  

I've also been using a tekobari to stroke the silk and lay each stitch down, as recommended by all my books and basically everybody. I think I'm definitely getting the hang of that technique, and I do find it helps a lot. I'm just going to need more practice with it to really get a handle on it. Happily, I've got a lot more flowers to embroider, which should give me plenty of time to learn.