Plum Blossoms and Maple Leaves Completed

I finally completed my Plum Blossoms and Maple Leaves piece by Midori! There was a four-week hiatus in there because I ran out of the main green thread and it took a while to obtain another spool in the right color. Minus that delay, this piece actually only took me about three weeks to complete, which is a bit faster than the five weeks it took me to do the first piece. And I think it's definitely an improvement over the first Japanese embroidery piece I did.

To conclude this one, I started with the second to last maple leaf. I decided to do this one using two strands of flat silk to make it recede a bit, as I did with one of the other leaves:

This picture is a bit blurry unfortunately, but you can see I did exaggerated long and short stitches so that they would blend better. Here's the completed foundation:

I think it looks pretty good. You can see on the left side that I put in some short stitch holding — those slightly diagonal lines — to hold some of the longer stitches in place. I think I'm getting a bit better at that.

Next, I stitched the foundation for the fifth and final maple leaf using 4 -> 1 twisted silk:

This leaf was a bit trickier because it was on an angle, which meant I couldn't follow the weft lines in the fabric, so it was harder to keep my stitches straight. But I don't think it looks too bad. The last step was to add the vein lines, starting with the stitch transfer method (more about how to do that here):

Once I had stitched down my vein guidelines and carefully removed the quilting paper, I put in the veins by couching down a pair of gold Japanese threads:

To be honest, I don't think that last leaf is quite as neat as my other leaves. But between work and current events, I'm too exhausted to do redo it in hopes of a slight improvement. And there really isn't time anyway. I'm supposed to learn how to properly do the finishing process on this piece this weekend and then hopefully start my phase 1 piece. So I am officially calling this one done (albeit not "finished" or framed). Here is the completed piece:

I'm really pretty proud of it. I think those leaves at the top look beautiful — as good as I could possibly do. I'm happy with how round and full my plum blossoms look, and I love the color of them. And my Japanese knot clouds add a dainty, delicate touch. And most importantly, I can really see a lot of progress since my first piece. This one is a great improvement on my Cherry Blossoms and Chrysanthemums. And I can be satisfied with that. Once it's framed, I think most people will probably never notice any of the little imperfections. It just makes me feel very happy to have completed it and have it look as nice as it does. 😊