Phase 2: Kikko (Hexagon) Pattern, Part 1

It's very important to read the directions right before starting a new pattern, even if you've already read them before. It's easy to forget if any time passes between the first reading and the actual stitching. How do I know this? Experience, my friends.

Unable to bear the thought of doing 200 Japanese knots this week, I decided to move on to another segment for a little while. The dark blue segment I had stitched in weft foundation still needed the kikko pattern (sometimes also called the hikko or hexagon pattern) applied to it. Since the beginning of the kikko pattern is the same as that of the flax leaf effect (creating a bunch of equilateral triangles), I figured this would be easy. I started by making horizontal lines 6mm apart using 1-->1 twisted silk in the same color as the foundation:

Aaand then I looked more closely at the tiny font describing the kikko pattern and realized that the triangles for this pattern should actually be 4mm triangles, not 6mm like I did for the flax leaf effect. Siiiiigh.

So out all these stitches came. And then I redid my horizontal lines 4mm apart:

Much better. I won't go into too much detail here about how to make precise triangles because you can refer to my original post on the Flax Leaf Effect, Part 1 for that. But the next step was to lay lines at a 60-degree angle to the first set, again 4mm apart:

And then I laid the third set of lines at 60-degree angles to the first two sets to complete the triangles:

Beautifully even, with only slightly off angles near the edges. That always happens. I have no idea how to prevent it, so I just accept it. (It hasn't made a visible difference yet to the finished look, so I figure it's not worth worrying about.)

The last step for the triangles was the laborious process of couching down all the corners. I used 1-->2 twisted silk in the same dark blue color because that's what the box chart recommended:

The photo above is the halfway point of the couching process. You can see that the left side looks a little more quilted, and the right side is still floating lightly above the foundation. Here's the couching completed:

These triangles seem pretty even to me, and once I put on the hexagonal part of the kikko pattern in bright silver metallic thread, the triangles should fade somewhat into the background, thus hiding any minor flaws. Here's everything I've done to this point:

I'm really loving it, but I have decided to do one thing differently in the future. The next time I stitch any kind of lattice work or horizontal triangles, I will couch down the corners with half a strand of flat silk, lightly twisted on the needle (like I did for the dark purple lattice on the far left segment), instead of doing 1-->2 twisted silk. I don't think it makes enough of a difference to justify the extremely tiresome process of splitting one strand of flat silk into four sections of three suga each and then twisting them into two strands of couching thread. The couching stitch is so tiny as to be virtually invisible, so going forward, I'll make it a little easier on myself. 

Anyway, next up is the silver hexagons. I'm really excited to see how these turn out. I hope they will brighten up that dark blue segment a bit, as it's really quite dark right now.