Phase 1: Gold-tipped Bamboo Leaves and Plum Blossom Buds

Oh, the bliss of some time off work! It's amazing to wake up naturally, have a relaxed breakfast, and start on my needlework right away. I'm refreshed and excited when I begin it, I have more patience to deal with mistakes, and I have the energy to keep at it for hours. It's amazing the progress I can make under these circumstances.

The day after Christmas, I set about my Japanese embroidery with enthusiasm. It was time to add the next color to my piece — a lovely, rich green. I started on the bamboo leaves at the very top of the stalk. Since I would be using flat silk on this particular set of leaves, I decided to do some self-padding to make the leaf appear fuller. I started by laying down the padding stitches of 1.5F silk perpendicular to the direction the final stitches would go:

I didn't pad all the way to the tip because I envision the tip being a bit thinner. Next, I started the final stitches by working my way from the tip to the base, stitching over the padding:

During this process, I took out a lot of stitches and reset them because I've learned the hard way that if it bugs me 2 seconds after putting it in, it will probably bug me even more 20 minutes later. But at that point, it will be a lot more work to undo it. Consequently, it took me 2 hours to get this far:

Happily, I had Bridgerton going on Netflix to keep me from getting too frustrated. Unhappily, Bridgerton distracted me a little too well, as you will soon see. I had finished the three leaves (the fourth partial leaf has to wait till the bamboo stalk is in because it's in the background) and moved on to stitching a padded plum bud in soft rose pink to the left of my first plum blossom:

At this point I noticed a problem. Those two bamboo leaves to the right are lovely, but they're not correct. They're supposed to be tipped in gold to show the light hitting them, like it does the pine needles just below. Sigh. 

So out the bottom portion of both leaves came. I didn't take out the tops because they were already stitched beautifully in the right color. I was confident I could match the bottoms of the leaves to the tops because I could use the same holes for the new stiches as I had used originally (the holes were still slightly visible).

I snipped at the tip and then carefully drew out the thread until I had removed enough to allow me to put in gold tips. I just threaded a needle with the short length, put in my three tiny pinhead stitches to end it, and then snipped off the rest. I started the gold tips by alternating between gold and green to get the gradual shading I wanted:

That's better. This photo isn't great, but they really do look very pretty in real life. With that done, I went back to stitching plum blossoms and buds:

I'm really pleased with my one-point open space on the rose pink plum blossom to the lower left of the gold bamboo leaves. My trick is to somewhat ignore the pattern lines and focus mainly on the space between each petal when it comes to placing my needle on that edge. It helps a lot.

I'm pretty happy with the plum buds, too. They're reasonably round and they look pretty smooth overall. I did them in 1.5F silk (and used self-padding) because I imagine them being smaller and thinner than fully bloomed blossoms. The one on the upper right is supposed to be a bud that's just beginning to flower, so the two petals are stitched perpendicular to the center bud. I thought it turned out reasonably well. After I stitched the last bud below the gold bamboo leaves, I moved on to the pine needles at the top (I like a lot of variety when I'm stitching):

These went pretty well. My trick for them is to make sure the first stitch (the shorter one of the two) starts a little to the left of the line but ends directly on the line about 2/3 of the way down. Then with the second stitch, I start it a little higher than I think I need to and either right on the line or just to the right of it. I end it right on the bottom of the line and it nicely covers the base of the first stitch, giving me a wider top and and narrow bottom, just like a real pine needle.

The hard part of these for me is adding the gold metal thread because it always wants to twist. I have to work really hard and apply my laying tool with precision and some strength to get the gold stitches to lie smoothly and neatly:

I think they came out beautifully this time. And I'm loving the overall look of the gold highlights. Here's everything I've done so far:

The shimmer and shine of it all! I really think Japanese embroidery is the most lovely and elegant needlework I've ever tried. And I love how the angle of the light makes so few colors appear to have so much depth and shading. There are only five colors here, but it looks like I may have used two or three subtle shades for each one. It's just magical! 😍