Phase 2: Kikko (Hexagon) Pattern, Part 2

Oh, kikko pattern, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways. Thou art tiresome and finicky, not to mention super sneaky and damned difficult to make look right.

Ahh, pardon me. Just reminiscing for a moment on my JE work the last couple of days. Suffice it to say, if I never do the kikko pattern again, it will be too soon. But perhaps you'll need to see the process and the sneaky little step that caught me unawares to truly understand my disgruntled attitude towards this pattern.

The concept of the pattern is not that difficult. The execution of it, however, is another story. But we'll start with the concept. To make the hexagons, you come up at one corner of a hexagon, like so:

Now, I've already completed one row here because it's easier to see the pattern forming that way. But you start each row the same way. 

After coming up, you take the needle down at the second corner around the hexagon, moving clockwise:

You don't pull tight yet, though. You leave a loop (similar to flax leaf effect) and bring the needle up in the corner between the previous two corners, catching the loop with the needle:

At this point, the execution becomes tricky. You have to pull the loop taut while very carefully laying the metal threads down so that they rest side by side instead of twisting. Since they're being pulled at an angle and therefore are very inclined to twist, this can be difficult to achieve. 

No matter how hard I tried, sometimes I just did not achieve flat, side-by-side threads. Unfortunately, you can only stroke the metal thread so many times with a tekobari before it starts to strip the metal off the silk core. This happened to me, too. I did my best to hide it where it wasn't too noticeable. But sometimes if it stripped too much, I had to remove the stitch, end the thread, and start with a new metal thread. 

Anyway, once you pull the loop taut and get it as smooth and flat as you can, you take the needle down one corner away, like this:

And then you lay those threads as flatly as you can and pull it tight:

And sometimes they still twist. Sigh. I did later manage to get that last stitch to lay flat, but it took some doing. 

Now let's talk about placement of the needle and how it affects the pattern. Because it matters. A lot. For example, allow me to draw your attention to the picture below:

As you can see in the area I've circled in yellow, the silver stitch doesn't quite line up over the blue stitch. To make them line up perfectly, the needle has to come up and go down at the exact center of each corner — basically on top of the couching stitch that secures the triangle corners. But that's tricky to do. And even when I managed to place it in the exact center, it had a tendency to pull the foundation stitches apart and leave gaps showing the white silk fabric beneath. I tried to smooth the stitches back together, but sometimes they just didn't completely cover the fabric.

I'm hoping, though, that these issues are minor enough to not be very noticeable when looking at the segment (or the fan) as a whole. Here is the segment with all the main hexagons in place:

Even though they're not all perfectly aligned, I still think it looks pretty good. But this segment is far from complete. The next step is to fill certain hexagons with inner hexagons or little four-petal flowers, like this:

At this point, I noticed the sneaky little step that I had missed. If you compare the last two photos, you will see that my hexagons have their straight edges going horizontally, while the hexagons in the pattern above have their straight edges going vertically.

That's right. I did the initial triangles the wrong direction, so the hexagons are rotated 90 degrees from how they should be. When I looked more closely at the teeny tiny image for the first part of the kikko pattern in my PDF, I could see that it was different. But I hadn't bothered to look before I did the pattern. I just read the box chart, which said to do flax leaf effect for the first three rows, and thus did it the same way I had done it for the earlier flax leaf segment. Have I mentioned you should always read all the directions super carefully and closely? Particularly if they're minuscule and you're looking at them on an iPhone. Sigh.

But oh well. To fix this, I would have to snip out the entire segment and start it over from scratch. And I simply refuse to do this. I checked with Mary Alice and she assured me it would not be the end of the world if my hexagons face the wrong way and that she likes how they look. I'll just have to slightly adjust which hexagons get inner hexagons and which ones get flowers. So I printed out a picture of my hexagon segment and drew in my own pattern:

Some of the pencil lines I drew aren't terribly visible in this photo, but frankly, I think it will look very nice with my customized pattern. After all, I'm nothing if not an artiste. And what self-respecting artist would want to follow a pattern exactly? Really, this variation I've designed is just so much more me. At least, that's what I'm going to tell myself. 😂

Anyway, here's how the whole thing looks so far:

Actually, because of the angle of that segment within the overall fan, the straight edges of my hexagons really are vertical. They just don't match the original pattern. But at this point, whatever. I've suffered enough. 

And I actually do love the silver hexagons over the dark blue background. It brightens the segment up just as I was hoping it would. And when I finish adding the other elements of the pattern, it will be even brighter and, I'm sure, just lovely. Sometimes life is about accepting one's mistakes and making the best of them.😏