Phase 1: Bamboo Leaves Continued

I have worked on my Japanese embroidery every day this week. It's been utterly delightful to have the time and energy to devote to it. Since my last post, I continued working on bamboo leaves. First up was the largest set of leaves in the center of the stalk. This was the one I was supposed to do in gold from the very beginning.

Since it's so much larger, I decided to do twisted silk (4 -->1) with self padding:

The padding gave it just a touch more fullness, which I liked for such large leaves:

Next, I moved onto the leaf just under and behind the large gold one. Since I wanted this one to recede into the background, I used 1.5 flat silk with no padding:

At this point, I had a little hesitation about how to do those last two leaves since the tips were hidden and I always start from the tips. I texted Mary Alice, who told me to start from near the bottom with a long diagonal stitch the usual length (8 mm) and then fill it in with shorter stitches to the bottom. So that's what I did first:

After I filled it to the bottom, I stitched up toward the top of the leaf like I usually do. I did the same for both sides of the last two leaves:

I think they turned out fairly well. The space between the tip of the far right green leaf and the gold leaf could perhaps be a little larger, but I'm leaving it for now. It doesn't really bother me. What I'm quite happy about is that the gold leaf really stands out and does appear like it's in front of the other, which was what I wanted.

Lastly, I moved onto the lowest bamboo leaf:

I did this one in twisted silk (3 -->1) since it's in the foreground, but I left off the padding because these leaves are fairly small. However, I wanted to do some gold touches on the far right leaf, but I didn't think the twisted silk would look right next to flat strands of gold thread. Mary Alice told me I could twist one strand of gold in place of half a strand of flat silk to blend them together, so I tried that:

It's very subtle — just slight touches of shimmery gold, but that's okay. This leaf is at the very bottom of the stalk, so I imagine it wouldn't get as much light shining on it. Here's the whole piece up to this point:

I love how it's turning out! But I couldn't really do any more pine needles, plum blossoms, or bamboo leaves at this point because the rest are all in the background. The bamboo stalk has to be done before the other elements can be finished. So that's up next!