Phase 1: Pine Boughs and Bamboo Sprouts

I had a day and a half of Japanese embroidery lessons with Mary Alice this weekend. It was great fun, somewhat tiring, and very informative. The first things we tackled in our Zoom class on Saturday were gold work elements, specifically pine boughs and bamboo sprouts.

A while back, I wrote about stitching pine needles, which are these spindly little green and gold bunches:

The boughs are those little crescent shapes underneath them. And they're stitched in diagonal layer using half a strand of flat gold silk combined with one strand of #1 gold metallic thread.

Diagonal layer is tricky to explain, and it seems to differ slightly based on the shape you're stitching. But the basic principle seems to be that the stitches slant around a curved shape to fill it in. It's easier to show you in a drawing:

Basically, you start by making the short green stitch along the upper line. It begins one point outward from the actual point of the crescent (to help make a sharper point) and then ends on the top line. The next stitch is the pink stitch, which starts below the green one on the outer edge of the crescent (right on the line this time) and then slightly overlaps the first stitch and ends on the upper line. This stitch is a bit longer. Next is the purple line, which starts lower still, overlaps the pink stitch, ends on the upper line, and is longer than the previous stitch. And so on with all the blue stitches.

Here's what my first attempt looked like:

It's okay, but not great. There's a slight gap on the lower edge, just to the right of center. It's pretty important to get the starting point of each stitch equally spaced apart and fairly close together if you want it to look smooth. So I redid it:

That's a little better — much more smooth and even looking.

Next, I had to do the half-hidden ones to the right of the center crescent. In JE, we always start with the foreground elements and move to the ones in the background. This crescent starts the same way, but finishes a little differently:

I did the green stitch first, overlapped it with the pink, then the purple, and then the blue. But towards the end, the stitches get a bit more parallel. Mary Alice had initially suggested having three stitches on the left side of this crescent — one that finishes on the top line, one that runs along the bottom line, and one in between those. 

But this crescent was wide enough on that side that three stitches felt a little gappy. She told me in that case that it was perfectly acceptable to do four. So in the drawing above, there are two lines in between the top and bottom ones, and that's what I did here:

This picture is just a little blurry, but the crescent shape turned out all right. Here's that whole side finished:

Not too shabby, I think. And keep in mind that these are tiny. Each crescent is probably 7 or 8 millimeters in length. There's not a lot of room to stitch.

The boughs to the left were done a little differently from the center and right ones:

This time, I didn't start at the tip because it was hidden, but I did still work from right to left, starting with a short green stitch, overlapping it with the pink, then the purple, and then the blue. Getting the threads to go smoothly up that left tip was tricky and I had to redo it once, but I think they turned out nicely in the end:

The pine boughs just complete the pine needles so beautifully. I really like the shiny gold, despite my not being a gold person in general.

The next element we worked on was the bamboo sprouts — those little carrot top things above the bamboo leaves:

These are also worked using half a strand of gold flat silk with one strand of #1 gold, and they're also worked in diagonal layer (left diagonal, to be specific), but it's a little different than the crescents. Here's another drawing to show how I stitched these:

I started with the green, then the pink, then the purple, then the blue. There was some slight overlap of the stitches, but much less with this shape than with the pine boughs. These were a little easier to do:

They're simple and small, but they add a nice finishing touch to those bamboo leaves.

I still have a few more pine boughs and bamboo sprouts to finish, but the lessons are mostly about learning the techniques. And then I can practice them on my own. 

I find blogging about what I've learned helps me a lot because I tend to forget after a while, especially if I get busy with work and don't have time or energy to stitch for a few days. So in the end, these posts may help me more than anyone. But hopefully they answer a few questions for those who are curious.