Phase 1: Japanese Clouds ... Umm, I Mean, Pine Trees

Let's talk about Japanese pine trees. These elements are different from pine needles and pine boughs, both of which I've covered in earlier posts. 

Japanese pine trees look very different from American ones and tend to have kind of clumpy branches, so when they're reproduced in a stylized version for Japanese embroidery, they look a lot like clouds:

That's right, those four clouds are actually pine trees, meant to be showing up in the background of the skyline. But let's be honest, they totally look like clouds — so much so that I could not stop calling them clouds throughout my JE lessons this weekend, much to Mary Alice's amusement. But all I can say is that when I see that shape, my mind immediately pulls the word "cloud" from the recesses of my memory. I suspect it's going to take a while to reprogram the name for that shape in my brain.

The real problem is that when I was picking my colors for this piece, I chose a lovely shade of sky blue for those pine trees because I genuinely thought they were clouds. But bright sky blue is not at all the right color for pine trees. They are generally done in a more silvery or greyish green color (though this is by no means ubiquitous). 

I considered doing them in the same greyish green I did the pine needles in, but I also happened to have some silver thread on hand (from when I was debating whether to do this piece in silver or gold), so at Mary Alice's suggestion, I decided to do the first pine tree in 1.5F silver thread:

I stitched this in weft foundation, which is basically satin stich that follows the weft lines in the fabric. It really is lovely. However, those long stitches would never stay down that beautifully on their own. They'd eventually snag or gap or something. So this particular pine tree was supposed to be worked over in lattice holding stitch, which is essentially the same as lattice stitching in regular surface embroidery. But in JE, it's done a little more precisely:

Mary Alice taught me this super cool trick of laying one of my triangles down with a straight edge along the weft line of the fabric and holding it in place with magnets. (See, those needle minders keep coming in handy — they have even more uses than I'd realized.) The other triangle then slides up and down the straight edge so that 45-degree stitches can be placed across the cloud (grrrr, pine tree):

You can flip the second triangle to place 45-degree stitches in the opposite direction, thus achieving pretty nearly perfect squares of lattice work. 

I used the cool stitch guides I bought from Mary Alice to help me get the lines 3mm apart:

Here's how the pine tree looked once all the lattice lines were in place:

Pretty even on the whole. The last step was to couch down the corners of the lattice work with a small stitch going in the weft direction (the same direction as the original silver groundwork):

As you can see, this creates a sort of quilted effect. I quite like how it turned out. And I think it looks like a cloud more now than ever. 😂

The second type of pine tree in this piece is done a bit differently. It's also worked in weft foundation, but this time I used 3 --> 1 twisted silver thread:

This turned out lovely as well, but again, the stitches needed to be held in place so they wouldn't get messed up. This was kind of a complicated process, so I drew a sketch to show what I did:

The grey lines in the background are the twisted strands of silk covering the tree. Then you're supposed to take 1--> 2 twisted thread in the same color and stitch across the foundation stitches diagonally to hold them down (the green lines in the sketch above are the diagonal holding stitches). 

The trick is that the green threads are supposed to drop in between the twists of the foundation threads so that they essentially disappear, like this: 

And then you're supposed to couch longish (2mm) stitches (the purple lines from the drawing above) over the holding stitches to keep them in place. These couching stitches have to be done within a silk foundation stitch rather than between two foundation stitches.

Since you can't see the holding threads after they become invisible, you're supposed to slip a thin strip of white paper over the foundation stitches and under the holding threads so you can see where they are until you've placed the couching stitches. I don't know that I did this well at all, but here's how my little pine tree looked with the holding and couching stitches in place:

I mean, it looks okay, I guess. The holding stitches don't appear visible, which is the goal. And certainly, those foundation stitches weren't budging, which is what I wanted before I began putting in the branches. But I would really like to attend a JE class in person and watch a teacher doing this technique up close because I'm still not sure I fully understood it or did it right.

Anyway, on to the branches. I used quilting transfer paper to trace the lines for the branches, laid it over the pine tree, and then stitched in the branches along my traced outline. (I've blogged about this process before, so I won't go into detail here.) I didn't bother stitching an outline with couching thread this time. I just stitched right over the quilting paper with my #1 silver (half-hitched, so I used two strands). After I couched them down, I gently removed the quilting paper, and here's how it looked:

Alas, one of my branch lines slipped in between a couple of stitches and disappeared — where the blue circle is. But Mary Alice suggested I just add another stitch there to get the correct effect, so I did that:

That worked pretty well. These branches are not the most glorious things I've ever done, but they look all right. These photos are super close up, which tends to highlight every possible flaw. But some of these vein lines are only 1 or 2mm in length, so seen in real life, they look pretty decent. 

I still have one of each kind of these pine trees left to do on my own. So hopefully I'll have some time this week to tackle that. But they're a lot of work, so I may go finish some simpler elements first. Tricky, fiddly stuff takes a good amount of time and patience, which I don't typically have at the end of a long work day. 

But I am making really good progress on this piece. So good, in fact, that I ordered my phase 2 materials at the end of my Sunday lesson. I expect to be finished with phase 1 by the end of January, and I'm hoping my phase 2 materials will arrive shortly thereafter. It's very exciting, but you'll have to wait and see what I chose to do once the materials come in! 😊