Beginning Phase 2

About a week and a half ago, I had my first lesson on my phase 2 piece, Golden Fan. (It's just taken me a while to get to writing it up.) It was a private lesson with Mary Alice, and I got started on a few different elements of the fan — enough to keep me busy till my next lesson in late March. 

First up, we talked about all the weft foundation layers for the different segments of the fan. There are three such segments — one in twisted silk and two in flat silk. We started with the one using 4->1 twisted silk. 

Since it's so easy to get the angle off when trying to stitch parallel to the weft, Mary Alice suggested I either draw in guidelines with a ruler and a white pencil or stitch in guidelines with couching thread. Because I have had issues with the white pencil before (it's a bit thick and hard to get a fine straight line on fabric without a hard surface beneath it), I decided to stitch in my guidelines:

With that done, I started partway down the segment and began working my way to the top in my beautiful periwinkle blue:

I was very happy with the evenness of my twists, and I was doing a decent job keeping the stitches parallel to each other. But this process eats up a lot of silk. Weft foundation is stitched like satin stitch, not ladder stitch, so there's quite a bit of silk on the back. I must have used three lengths to do this small section. Once I got to the top of the fan, I sent this picture to Mary Alice:

She thought it looked great but mentioned that, generally, you stitch just inside the lines because the decorative silver lines between each segment will end up covering the edges. She said it was okay for this one, but I still may take it out. I think I'll want my segments to all be done the same way and not have one wider than the others.

The next thing we worked on was my first maple leaf. The first step was to take six strands of Japanese cotton padding and half-hitch it onto one of my koma. (You can also use buttonhole thread, but I recently bought a lifetime supply of the cotton padding from Mary Alice, so I had this on hand. 😂) Then I set the koma on one side of my awl and looped the cotton threads back around the awl so that I could undertwist them (alas, I didn't get a picture of this). Finally, I wrapped the twisted cotton around the koma and began to couch it down along the inside edge of the top segment of the maple leaf:

As with other couching, I did a double stitch at each end to secure it. This maple leaf is pretty small, so my stitches were like 2mm apart, if that. Once I had couched both sides of this segment down (they overlapped at the point), I snipped off the ends:

I cut them off very close at the inner edges because I didn't want any cotton padding between each segment of the leaf. The next step was to stitch this first segment using separated layer. This is the same stitch I used for the bamboo leaves on my phase 1 piece, but since this angle wasn't as steep as the one on the bamboo leaves, I didn't need to start at the point.

Instead, I started in the center of the maple leaf and worked my way up one side, stitching into the cave (i.e., starting with the convex side). I gradually angled my stitches to go around the curve of the segment till I got to the point. Then, on the other side, I hid a stitch under the point stitch and stitched my way back down that side to the middle, leaving a 1-pt open space (as well as I could):

I don't know if you can tell, but there were a lot fewer stitches on the second side, possibly because it was narrower. I tried to keep all my stitches as long as possible, but some of them near the point were definitely not as long as the 8mm stitches on my bamboo leaves.

The last thing we worked on during our session was the pinks, which are tiny little flowers with ruffled edges. My pinks were actually going to be done in lavender, purple, and silver, though, so we started with two strands of flat silk in lavender:

These started at each point of the ruffled edge and went 6mm into the flower, at a slight angle, leaving a gap for the second row. I first tried to fill these gaps with 2 strands of a gorgeous dark purple metal thread:

However, as you can see, this was too gappy and didn't quite fill in the edge of the flower. So after consulting with Mary Alice, I decided to cut out the second row and instead do one strand of flat silk with a single strand of the metal thread:

This did a better job of filling in the edge, so I completed the second row this way. I then did the third row using two strands of the dark purple metal thread. This row slightly overlapped the first row (by like 1mm), but I forgot to take a picture at this point. 😕

The last thing I did was add a fourth row with a single strand of silver metal thread, using somewhat random stitches to fill in the remaining gaps and add a nice contrast to the center:

While I like the overall look of the colors, my stitching was not very neat. I had taken out several stitches and tried to replace them, but metal thread doesn't come out easily and the silk got all fuzzy and clumpy. As a result, I later cut this petal out entirely. I'll redo it eventually, once I've done the fan segments on either side (this flower is in the background, so it should technically be done last). 

Also, I theorized, and Mary Alice confirmed, that it would be easier to do the first row on all the petals of one flower before moving on to the second row. And then do the third row and so on — less starting and stopping of thread and so less disturbance to the stitches. So that's what I'll do next time and hopefully it will turn out much neater and prettier! But regardless of my difficulties, it's still exciting to have started this piece and be learning new techniques. 😊