Phase 1: Dealing with Mistakes

I've been working on my Japanese embroidery, but it's been a bit slow going. Work has been incredibly busy this week, and I've been kind of tired. Plus, I realized that I had already made a couple of mistakes in my phase 1 piece, which I had to figure out how to deal with. That took some time and thought.

First, I went to continue stitching this clump of bamboo leaves, but upon taking a fresh look, I noticed a problem:

Somehow, I had gotten my sets of bamboo leaves mixed up. I was supposed to do a different, larger set of leaves in the pure gold. This set of leaves was supposed to be stitched in green with a few gold highlights. Additionally, because the plum blossom is in the foreground and overlaps the bamboo leaves, it should actually have been stitched first.

This was mistake #1. One solution was to take it all out and stitch it again in green after I stitched the plum blossom. My other option was to leave it in the gold and just stitch the plum blossom before I finished the bamboo leaves that it overlapped.

Since I didn't plan to stick to the exact color scheme shown in the JEC picture anyway, I decided to keep it as is for now and see if I like it in the gold once more of the piece is complete. If I don't, I can always take it out later. So I finished the parts of the leaves that weren't overlapped by the plum blossom and then moved on to start stitching the plum blossom:

Once the flower was complete, I went back and finished the rest of the bamboo leaves:

They actually look really good to me, so unless I decide later on that having this leaf in pure gold somehow ruins the look of the piece as a whole, I'll probably keep it.

Next, I moved on to stitching more pine needles. I got the first clump almost completely done, but the next day, in better light, I realized a lot of my stitches weren't even, the gold strands were too twisted and didn't lie neatly, and I hadn't fully covered some of the pattern lines. Who would have thought that two straight stitches could be so tricky? Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of how it looked at this stage, but I was not at all satisfied. 

This was mistake #2. After mulling it over, I decided I wasn't happy with the original stitching and I thought I could definitely do better, so I decided to take out every single pine needle and start from scratch. I painstakingly snipped out all of it and started to redo my pine needles in my soft greyish-green flat silk:

They look much better now. They're so much more even and they cover the pattern lines fully. I'm really pleased I decided to do these over again. Next up was to add the gold highlighting, which is supposed to show the light hitting the pine needles and making them glow. This time I was very careful to make sure each stitch laid flat and didn't get twisted:

I think it's so pretty with the green and gold, and I'm happy I decided to redo these little pine needles. I think they look very nice now. 

I ended up choosing sort of opposite solutions for my mistakes: I left one in and I took one out, but I think both solutions worked very well for their respective problems. Here's the piece as a whole so far:

Look at the sparkle and shine! 😍 There's obviously still a lot left to do, but I'm starting to get a sense now for how the piece will look when it's finished, and I think it will be glorious! Mistakes always happen, but if you can find good solutions, then it's onwards and upwards! 😊